mm34nn Glory and Honour? I haven't foreseen any fancy award, I'm sorry. I don't take any participation fee, either. The manual setup of this tournament is already quite a lot of work, but if there is some interest, I can open a donation account for players, and I'll buy Swiss chocolate for the winner from this pot.

Unfortunately I'd rather not commit to an additional six-month tournament at the moment, so I won't be trying to defend my title this time. Please make my spot available for another player. Good luck to all the competitors!

Airren I respect your decision, although I regret it, naturally. It is a longer commitment, that is true, but it is also always just one game at a time. Fast Async rounds usually play in around two weeks. The first stages will surely take rather a bit longer, the later ones probably less.

Jorrig The last tournament format suited me quite well as my only tournament! I prefer having one fast async game to focus on at all times rather than many simultaneous games. But I'm also trying to battle my way up in the International Championship, and once those games began to overlap the mental load was too high for me. If I ever stop playing the International I could be interested in another knockout tournament in a similar style, or perhaps even a Swiss-system tournament where everyone plays opponents with a similar record.

Airren Focus definitively enhances your chances of winning. I use this as an excuse for my bad performances. I like the Swiss-system tournaments, especially the name. They have proven to be difficult to implement here, though. Problem here is the scoring and ranking of that system. You'll have to keep those records externally, and assign all matches manually. I'll keep it in my notebook as a challenge.

We're complete the tournament has started!
Just some more clarifications:

• Players who run into a timeout will be placed last, obviously. If there are still loser's rounds to play, I'll try to replace them with new players.
• I probably won't play a "seeding round" as stated in the description. All seeding will be random. That should speed up the tournament, I hope.

Good luck everyone, enjoy!

I'm very honored to be playing in Roger Federer group. Have fun everyone and thank you Jorrig for organizing this amazing tournament!

2 more timeouts and we can skip stages 2 and 3 entirely

MoonlitShadow I don't see a good way to handle this. You could play a 2p game to decide who proceeds. Otherwise, I'll have to toss a coin, everything else (rank, alphabet etc.) seems a bit unfair to me. From second round on I can do a tie-break based on previous tournament results. Sorry for that, but since there is an alternative to qualify for the next round I hope it won't be too bad either way.

Jorrig I’ll leave it up to you. I think us playing a 2p game would be ok, but we would have to play it between round 1 and 2 which would delay the tournament. So I think you should just come up with something on your own, either coin toss or some other in-game tiebreaker determination.

Jorrig We could call it a warm up round to filter out slow players and get some data for next round tie-breakers That should solve MoonlitShadow case nicely, both of them will pass to the next round. However, we need one more player to timeout

Oh and I just noticed an error in your initial plan for the stages. 96 + 48 + 24 is actually 168, not 144. And that affect all other stages as well.

xRen1101 So you noticed. As commented above, my setup was correct, I just wrote it down in a bad way. It is 168 and 84 for the following stages, such that we'd land at 126 players for final K.O. phase. The missing two would be promoted by best result in the previous round (whoever lost by the least amount of points).
I cannot edit the description, unfortunately, I keep receiving an http 500 each time I try.

Thanks for the great tournament and all the effort you put into it!

I am trying to set up the next stage, but I am having some issue - I cannot divide 168 players over 4 groups. So I fiddled a bit with the settings and currently some players are not confirmed yet. I'll proceed as soon as I can figure out what to do.

Hi Jorrig, does that include players who timed out in stage 1? Not sure how you/others feel about this but have seen in other tournaments that those who timed out automatically are excluded from following stages...

Lodon I decided to follow the suggestion from above and just promote everyone who didn't time out. Before waiting for some 27 replacements would probably take too long. I don't want those timeouts, so I'll exclude everyone and proceed to stage 4 directly. (I'll have to include one of them so that numbers match. I'll take the one who timed out last, i.e. somewhen in Age III)

Jorrig I applaud that decision! At least you know that those who progress are the more active players. Will be a surprise though for numbers 3 and 4 who don't read this discussion to find themselves playing stage 4