| 05 February 2010
I've always considered the hardest thing to do in a tournament is reach the final match. From there, let the cards fall where they may.
The level of difficulty in terms of getting to the finals depends on which route you take. And perhaps the hardest route is to lose an early match and then win several games in a row through the losers bracket.
How tough is it to make a run in the losers bracket? After two rounds of play (first round and then the first round of losers) roughly a quarter of the field or less is eliminated. And then the chances of getting farther and farther in the bracket go down drastically. The percentages are against you so badly (tenths of a percent).
I’ll mention a couple examples that I’ve seen recently.
Suiken, who finished fifth at NorCal StrongStyle 4 this past weekend, had to make a hefty run in the losers bracket just to get fifth place. He won a tournament-record six matches in a row in the losers bracket before being sent home.
Another great example is Mike Ross. He lost the first match of the UGTL 4 tournament a couple months ago. However, he won the next eight in a row just to get to the Second Semifinals, where he lost to ComboJack.
That’s just two players … out of 174 to do that. That’s 1.14 percent of the field. At the UGTL 4 tournament, the longest losers bracket run following Mike Ross was three wins, done by two people (Nima and Warren). And they were still far from getting to the title match.
I checked out some other brackets, and it's been fairly the same. One person, if any, makes a run among a massive field that gets them to within sniffing distance of the final match.
In the 10 years I've been competing in tournaments and running Get Your Tournament, I've only heard of three times where someone lost their first match and then ran the table. Three ... out of hundreds of tournaments over a span of 10 years!
Insomnotek is the tournament organizer of the Video 94 Tekken 6 ranbats; he’s seen plenty of guys try to make a run in the elimination bracket. More times, those players have failed. Some have succeeded. He talks about what he’s seen in this podcast extra.
