Saturday, June 18, 2011

Coin Toss Tournament

I was doing some reading on Dreamhack and came across a qualification tournament for the main Starcraft 2 event at Dreamhack. Essentially you had a 64 person single elimination tournament set up. The top 2 from that tournament qualified for Dreamhack. The winner of that tournament got to play a series against a known pro with 10000 SEK on the line. (Swedish Kronen, with an approximate value of $1500 Canadian.) It's not clear but I know the League of Legends qualifications came with airfare and hotel so it's possible this event did too. Either way the prizes seem pretty sweet. (First place at the Dreamhack main tournament is 100000 SEK, so $15k. It's noteworthy that the LoL tournament has a first place prize of $50k, though it is split 5 ways. I'd have thought the SC2 event would be worth a lot more but I guess Riot is really trying to pump up the LoL tournament scene.)

At any rate the qualifier tournament had an interesting twist. I asked Andrew about it and his opinion on the format agreed with mine and I wanted to solicit some other opinions on the matter. I will post my reaction to the format at a later date.

The twist? Most of the rounds were best of 3 matches of Starcraft 2. The 2nd and 4th rounds, however, were determined solely by flipping a coin. Thoughts?

No comments: