Standard competitive, nothing weird
If you already play in brackets this is all normal and you can skip it. If you don’t, here’s what each one means.
How a set is played
- 3 stocks, 7 minutes
- Three lives each, and if nobody’s out at seven minutes whoever’s ahead takes it.
- Items off, hazards off
- No Poké Balls, no stage gimmicks, just the match.
- Double elimination
- You have to lose twice to be out, so one bad set never ends your day.
- Best of 3
- First to two, and best of 5 for the last few sets.
- Stages, Division 3
- Game one is random. After that, whoever lost picks. Nothing to memorize.
- Stages, Divisions 1 and 2
- Stage strike into counterpicks, the normal way. You’ll have watched it all day before you ever move up.
- Bring your own controller
- Setups are shared. Controllers are not.
Moving between them
Three instead of two on purpose. If it were only “the good players” and “everybody else,” everybody else is still a huge range, and the same guy would win that bracket every month while the newer players got knocked out early anyway, which is the exact thing this is supposed to fix.
- Moving up
- Win your division twice in your last three nights and you move at the next event. One good night doesn’t take away the bracket you came for. Win it without dropping a single set, in a bracket of eight or more, and you move right away.
- Moving down
- You never get demoted for losing. If a division stops being fun you can ask to move down once a season. Your call, not mine.
- Playing up
- Enter above your division whenever you want. Doing well counts toward moving up, doing badly never counts against you.
- Thin nights
- If a division draws fewer than five people it runs together with the one above it for that night, announced before the bracket locks.
Short, and the same for everybody
I run this the way I’d want my own kids treated in the room, and that is the whole standard. A rule you only enforce on people you don’t know isn’t a rule.
- Show up on time for your set. Two calls, then it’s a DQ.
- No slurs, no threats, no touching somebody else’s setup.
- Bring a dispute to me before the next game starts, not after the set ends.
- Regulars and first-timers get held to the same standard.
The short answers
- Do I need to be good?
- No. That’s the whole reason there are three divisions.
- When’s the first one?
- Not announced. The venue is being worked out and the group gets the date first.
- How much?
- Entry and payout get posted with the event. Expect it to be cheap.
- What if I don’t know anybody?
- Most people won’t at the first one. That’s sort of the point of a first one.
- Never entered a bracket?
- Division 3 is built for exactly that. Tell me it’s your first one and I’ll walk you through the rest as it comes up.
- Can I just watch?
- Yeah. Come see what it’s like and enter the next one.
The group gets the date first
Venue’s being worked out right now, and everything gets posted in the group and the Discord before it goes anywhere else.
Not on Facebook? Get the date by email.