Our First Tournament - May 16, 2021
We held our first tournament on Sunday the 16th of May, 2021! We had 10 competitors take part, for an enjoyable morning of twenty squares!
A big congratulations to the skill of everyone who took part! It was a tense tournament down to the very final game, where in an upset Aratkovich defeated the yet undefeated Timogustafson 7 to 4! I had a lot of fun meeting and playing against you all!
Results
A massive congratulations to Aratkovich for winning the title of the first ever Tournament Winner!
Top 5:- Aratkovich
- Timogustafson
- Nitt
- Ella Roman
- Zakk Lightman
Recap
Most of our competitors were from the US, Brazil, and Mexico, and so the tournament was scheduled for Sunday morning, at 10AM Central Standard Time! Everyone arrived bright and early for the tournament, although it took me some time to organise the schedule, so round one didn't start until 10:30AM.
Round One
The tournament started off in style with round one having every competitor play three games to narrow down the field from the original 10, down to the final 4! After some tense, nail-biting games, Timogustafson was the only player to go undefeated for the first round! In second place, Zakk Lightman, Ella Roman, Aratkovich, and Nitt all had 2 wins and 1 loss at the end of round one.
Unfortunately, there were only 4 places in the finals, but 5 players to fill those positions! To break this tie, we used the player's total tiles scored from all their games in round one. This led to Zakk Lightman unfortunately not making it into the final 4, as he only scored 4 tiles in his game against Diego Raposo.
Round Two
Round two started off with the round one leader Timogustafson playing Nitt, and Aratkovich playing Ella Roman. These were both tense games, with Timogustafson continuing his winning streak by beating Nitt 7 to 6, and Aratkovich defeating Ella Roman 7 to 4. The next game had Timogustafson defeat Ella roman 7 to 4, and Aratkovich beating Nitt 7 to 6!
After only these two games, the best of 3 games had already been decided, with Timogustafson and Aratkovich both having already won 2 games each! Therefore, the third game in this round was skipped, and we went straight to the finals!
Final Matches
For the final match, Nitt and Ella Roman competed for 3rd place, while Timogustafson and Aratkovich competed for the illustrious Tournament Winner title! Nitt and Ella Roman's game was quite quick, with Nitt taking 3rd place with a score of 7 to Ella Roman's 5.
This brought us to the final match between Timogustafson and Aratkovich! Thanks to recent changes, everyone was able to spectate this match as it came to an exciting end with Aratkovich managing to sneak through with a 7 to 4 win!
Future Tournaments
Our first ever tournament was a great success, and I hope we can host many more future tournaments with similar enjoyment! There were however some learnings from this tournament that we will try to address before the next tournament!
- The names on the games generated by the RoyalUr.net Discord Bot sometimes glitched, which led to the games often having to be re-generated a few times to get working. This software bug should hopefully be fixed for next time!
- We split the competitors in Round One into two pools of players. This was a good idea when we had 8 competitors as then each pool would have no byes, however, with 5 people in each pool this just led to more confusion and skipped games! In the future, it would be better to come up with a better solution.
- At the end of round one, we had 5 competitors that had qualified for the finals, however only 4 places. This led to us having to eliminate Zakk Lightman despite him winning two of his three games! In the future, it would be good to make it clearer how these tie breaking situations will be handled.
Certificates
One of our community members, Diego Raposo, made certificates for everyone who took part in the tournament! A big thankyou to Diego for making them so we can have these certificates to commemorate the event!
