Crescent Midsummer Shodown #1 - Celebrating 25 years of Beyblade - Tournament Report

Hello everyone. I am reporting on our first local Ranked event held at the Eldritch Bastion in Ashland, Ohio. bsquared and I, Team Oversoul, organized the event with two of our Judges Csey and WillyActual, the coordinators for Crescent’s Edge, who have an established relationship with the Eldritch Bastion. This location is primarily a TCG shop but they offer various boardgames as well. There is a lot of room here and great parking. The shop was fresh and clean as always and they have drinks and chips but coffee and hot food is about 20 minutes away. We arrived 20 minutes prior to official start time, and our two other judges and several players and their parents arrived shortly thereafter.

Setup
We quickly setup two stadiums and a tentative third stadium should we have a free judge to run a third match at the same time as S1 and S2 have active matches. We had 14 total sign ups, one of which signed up as we were setting up the stadiums, and another late arrival who arrived ~20 minutes after official start time.
We would not realize it until a day after the tournament, but we had Bladers from all over the state come to our event. Over and over, they exclaimed how excited they were to have Beyblade being hosted in their state and how hard it is to find regular events in Ohio. We hope to change that for the Northern Ohio at the very least but we’d love to go to events in Columbus too. If you host it, they will come!

Point System "TO-BSX" v0.1:
Our Point system was inspired by Bakuten Shoot, by reducing the amount of points granted overall and creating an environment that allowed for more nuance in deciding battles over 5 and 7 point thresholds than a random strike securing 3 points.
Round 1 is First to 5
Round 2 is First to 7
Spin/Over/Own Finish: 1 point
Burst/X Finish: 2 points

Round 1 Reset
We began Round 1 of the tournament with 12 Bladers as a Round-Robin split into 6 groups of 2 and for Round 2, we were to have a Single-Elim with the remaining 8 Bladers. About 25 minutes into the event, we had to reset the bracket and change formats because we didn’t want to have 4 players to only get to play 1 match for the entirety of the event. We added the late arrival into the new bracket and started again with 13 Bladers in a Double-Elim in 1 group for Round 1, and Single-Elim for Round 2. This caused 3 players to get a bye, and we did not realize that until later.
Match sides were random and undetermined until the moment players were called. As a host, there are a lot of things to manage when organizing people into specific roles or stations, we used this chaos to to randomize sides with zero bias between 2-3 judges. Not one player requested a side over another, and I find that the players there were more interested in practicing launching on both sides rather than playing to the strength of one or the other.
Bladers agreed to the custom point system, and were generally interested in the change. After the event, I held a poll on our discord, and it seems they didn’t really feel any difference. There was a lot of build variety, some using stock Hasbro, some using stock TT beys. Our age range was 10-37.
The parents were very understanding about the delay and eventual bracket reset. They all seemed very excited to watch their kids compete and some of them actually knew each other from another event they went to before. They showed particular interest in our stadium setups, recording setups, and communication with them and their kids. I hope to inspire them to participate in the events in the future.

Round 2 - Finals
As round 2 started, 3 players played twice anyway, 1 with a bye, and two were out, I was one of them. It left me with more time to run the event but it also let me realize what we had done wrong and what we can do better next time. My previous experience with non-beyblade tournaments usually required that I did not participate in the event, so, playing and organizing at the same time is new for me, especially over 9 years after the last event I hosted in any capacity. With the help of our judges Csey, WillyActual, bsquared, and myself, we were able to rally together an event for the Eldritch Bastion without more issues than that initial hiccup for how we wanted players to experience the event. The elapsed time of the event was 2 hours 35 minutes including the initial 20 minute mistake. Everyone had a blast, and everyone is really excited for the next event in Ohio.

Grand Finals
Grand Finals featured two fairly new bladers Adam 12, and Custom_Spin along with Draconic Blader, and bsquared.

Adam12 and Draconic Blader would have to wait in Semi Finals for bsquared and Custom_Spin as they found themselves in the Losers bracket but they both climbed out with decisive wins of 5-0 and 5-2 respectively to secure their position in R2.

Custom_Spin carefully took a win from Csey at 7-6. WillyActual lost their set vs bsquared 1-7. Adam12 and Adeeb12, brothers in life, and blading fought for their spot in semi finals, Adam12 taking the set 7-1.

The Semi Finals began with an exciting 3-1 Lead against bsquared but she was able to pull it back closing the set at 7-3.
Adam12 and Draconic Blader faced off in a fierce battle, point by point but Adam could not withstand the power of Draconic Blader’s Hellscythe on Ball vs Adam’s HellsChain on High Taper.

Draconic Blader likely did not think he would see bsquared again after his win in group stage of 5-3. Still, he was able to hold onto his win streak and take the win with 7 points vs bsquareds 4 points.

Winning Combos

Our Top 4:
1st Draconic Blader 
2nd bsquared_92
3rd Adam12 
3rd Custom_Spin

Until Next time!

Event Video Coverage
Full Coverage of Stadium 1 including Finals
[url=https://www.youtube.com/doublestar.stream]https://www.youtube.com/doublestar.stream[/url] (In Progress)
Stadium 2 Coverage and Shorts
[url=https://www.tiktok.com/BeyBlade.x.ohio]https://www.tiktok.com/BeyBlade.x.ohio[/url]