FOOLCiRCLE

So this weekend it happened again, and it happened in a big way.

Click on the above image for a larger view of the Top 64 from the Tournament 512.

We got together for the big one on Saturday (08.16.08), The 512 Greatest of All Time, Randomly Drawn, Non-Seeded Tournament. Yes I said five hundred twelve, ri-dic-u-lous, seriously. So we have been talking about this for the better part of a year, and honestly I think there is a part of me that has been putting this off on purpose for the better part of a year. I was a little intimidated going into this, more for the time commitment and possible rivalry flair-ups, but it appears to have been unwarranted. No major arguments, sheesh honestly I don’t think there were any arguments, and we seriously busted this thing out in like 9 or 10 hours. I know that sounds like a lot of time, but I really thought it was going to take like twice as long.

So Erik, Robert, and I had to figure out the logistics of this thing, I mean really, you don’t want to get 8 hours into this thing and run into a problem from miss-counting. So forward-thinking uses saved all of the previous names from the first four tournaments, so really all we had to do was verify that there were 128 names four times. All the names were there, so we were ready to move on to the next phase, figuring out the logistics of the brackets. Again, forward-thinking, I had asked someone I knew about the possibility of printing the bracket on a plotter. The advantage of the plotter was that we could do the tournament on a single piece of paper 36 inches by however long we needed. Well that turned out to be 36 inches by 96 inches – 3 feet by 8 feet, crazy! The original layout was almost 6 feet by 16 feet, but we remedied that quickly.

This time the tournament was mostly the same idea, but completely different at the same time. The aspects that were the same were that we were doing a completely pointless, random, non-seeded tournament with characteristics from the previous four tournaments (Front-men, Villains, Heroes, and Hot Chicks). A couple of the things that were different were the No-Nah rule, the Top Eight DQ rule, and the No Criteria rule (I just made all those names up).

More pictures for your viewing pleasure. 

Previously we would have our “nah” system in place where we were given a certain amount of over-turn authority in which no one opinion could easily out weigh the game, versus this time we played the entire game with no “nahs” and it never seemed to get out of line. Next we decided that all of the top eight from the previous four tournaments needed some weight in the first round (256 battles). So we decided that if any two of the top eights went up against each other in the first round they would be thrown back into the pot and redrawn, essentially an automatic “nah”, I think this only happened twice. And finally there was the unspoken (remarkable) no criteria that was involved. Somehow the discussion never happened and it made things that much better, that is, the discussion of by what criteria are we judging these battles? Because, really, how do you determine who is better in a battle like Jessica Simpson vs. The Purple Pie Man? Sometimes the thought pattern was along the lines of: Is “X” a better villain then “Y” is a better Frontman? And other times it was more like a Mortal Combat video game with the two players openly fighting each other. And sometimes ‘boobs’ just win. And yes, all of these were going on in my head the whole day.

To say it was a fun crazy day isn’t to say enough. Though this was our “last” tournament I honestly only see this as the beginning.

This entry was posted on Monday, August 18th, 2008 at 9:18 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.