Favorites in battle! - 5 The Battle of Favorites! - 5

Apparently, it's my turn to reminisce. :)\ Favorite Players in Action! - 3\ \ The tournament was an instant hit, as the guys already wrote, and after a successful second iteration, it could be considered traditional, and traditionally, it should have been held in autumn.\ Pit contacted me in the summer of 2010 and suggested that we hold a tournament together, which came as a complete surprise to me, since I had no experience at all, and this tournament is by definition one of the largest and most important. Nevertheless, I agreed because I always enjoy trying something new. Pit took care of the brackets, and I was responsible for overall organization and communication with players. Looking ahead, I will say that all this organizational work made a rather negative impression on me and significantly diminished the Heroic romance, but on the other hand, I gained good experience in this regard.\ \ Even at the stage of forming the first post, it was decided to make some changes:\ 1) Panic was removed from the list of templates and replaced with Mini-Nostalgia. It so happened that around this time, Panic began to transform into an undesirable template, largely due to the promotion of HL builds as "true" templates, but 6LM10 and 8XM12 were almost not played at that time, so Mini-Nostalgia appeared, if I'm not mistaken, from Portal. This seemingly insignificant change fundamentally altered the principle of the draft: the dominance of CM balance-Panic was eliminated, and it became possible to reliably choose one of three "true" templates - Jeb, 8mm6 or Mini-Nosta, which opened the way to the tournament for some who had previously been excluded from the old trio.\ 2) A list of banned players was added to the first post. This minor innovation simply aimed to show players who was accepted and who wasn't, without unnecessary questions. There were more and more players, so we started introducing a practice of filtering newcomers, and some who had committed offenses. It seemed like that was all, except that PReDS (who, by the way, won the CIS Championship the following year) ended up on this list. He got there because of his rather inappropriate behavior in one of the previous tournament games (we won't remember what exactly happened), and the fact that a strong player was banned from the tournament not because of cheating or map hacking, but simply for his behavior, was new.\ 3) Our rules included an addition about the game version - "...or by mutual agreement WT, TE, or TE Light". WT... The WT version was already gaining popularity and was declared as an alternative version "at will," while the previous Favorite Players tournaments only featured TE. WT was a pleasant alternative to TE, and some true SoD players began playing it, which simplified the integration of this version into tournaments, but at the same time brought considerable negativity to the tournaments being held at that time, fueling the growing WT-vs-SoD conflict. By chance, I was destined to be immersed in all of this. The essence of the problem was that the balance of castles in SoD and WT is significantly different, and if in SoD, for example, Swamp and Barbarian are middle-tier castles, then in WT they are top-tier. The point of Favorite Players is to play with one castle, and therefore, in pairs of versatile players (playing on both versions), conflicts were inevitably bound to arise – each would pull the blanket towards the version most suitable for their castle, which often ended in misunderstanding. Well, never mind, bygones are bygones, and we nevertheless learned a lesson from this, as did the players: when signing up for Favorite Players, you need to be ready to play SoD and only SoD, and choose your favorite castle to play on this version.\ \ The tournament started. The distribution by castles turned out like this:\ 1) Swamp - 7 pcs.\ 2) Rampart - 6 pcs.\ 3) Castle - 5 pcs.\ 4) Conflux - 5 pcs.\ 5) Inferno - 4 pcs.\ 6) Dungeon - 4 pcs.\ 7) Barbarian - 3 pcs.\ 8) Necropolis - 3 pcs.\ 9) Tower - 3 pcs.\ \ That is, the future winner was Swamp, and it also had the largest number of players. There were no real outsiders in this regard; at least 3 players were registered for each castle.\ By the way, it's interesting that the winners of the previous Favorite Players tournaments, Dudge and Pit for LM, did not participate in this tournament – the first has long been inactive, and Pit decided to take a break.\ \ The group stage went quite smoothly. From the top spots came: Kluka (Rampart), RomarioGrom (Conflux), Keba (Dungeon), Mizrael (Castle), Medium_HP (Swamp), OUTLAW (Rampart), Alone (Necropolis), Satir (Swamp) and they immediately got into the 1/8 playoffs. The second and third places went to 1/16 and had to play against each other for a place in 1/8. I remind you that the playoffs were played according to single-elimination rules, i.e., one loss meant elimination from the tournament.\ Of the outsider castles, Inferno performed best - 3 players made it to the playoffs - LeBron, Wic and FireToSky, but the first was eliminated already in 1/16, and the other two were drawn together in the first round, where the future Player of the Year 2010 won - Fayer.\ Barbarian performed worst of all, not making it to the playoffs at all. And Tower, thanks to rebellious, managed to reach as far as 1/8!\ By the way, Necropolis and Elemental also lost in 1/8 – bad luck. But Rampart continued confidently. All recognized veterans were eliminated even before 1/2, and less well-known players reached the semi-finals: Satir, Kluka, Keba, and OUTLAW - 2 Ramparts, Dungeon, and... Swamp! Satir was relatively new - winner of "Rookie-2009", Keba is a fairly strong player from Portal, little was known about Kluka, because he played rarely, and OUTLAW, for whom participation in this tournament became the most successful throughout his playing career (2nd place). As a result, Satir with Swamp honestly won the tournament, immediately establishing himself as a top player, which he later confirmed by winning FB-5.\ \ Here are some more interesting facts:\ Perhaps the most important one: according to the bracket, Satir was supposed to play against Fayer, but it turned out that they simply couldn't connect with each other (they couldn't set it up), and they decided to flip a coin, since time was running out, here is the report. Sometimes a coin toss can turn the tide of an entire tournament. :)\ Fayer, by the way, had to flip a coin in another round - in the match against Medium - report, quite funny. :)\ Wlk777 also played in this tournament – it was one of his last tournaments on this resource, after which he fell into disgrace and was banned.\ And Favorite Players-3 also became one of the last straws for the player SEM_56, who always took this game very close to heart. Here is a report about his defeat, full of emotions. By the way, few people probably know that with his departure, Sem disbanded the "Knights of the Apocalypse" clan, where he was then the leader, and "Knights" at that time was one of the strongest clans on this resource; it included: Gomunguls, GoD, numOne, OUTLAW and several other good players.\ \ That's all, folks. The tournament ended, and I could finally breathe a sigh of relief. :)