Jun-05-2022: "Silver Springs Reminisce About GT" tournament reports

The following are words I have to say about "Silver Springs Reminisce About GT", an unranked tournament using Burst GT 3v3 format.

I recommend the following music for reading the report. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2YphhoTR0cg . Look, I play a lot of good videogames, don't judge me.
 
- We had about 32 people pre-register, and as always only 22 showed up. One showed up during round 2, and another showed up after round 5. Most of the newer bladers didn't read the rules about GT format in the announcement, none of the parents did. One blader didn't even look at the site ahead of time, their parents registered them. I don't know what to tell you, people read "Beyblade Tournament" and immediately skip reading any clarifying details such as rules or times.
 
- The weather was hot. 80ish degrees, not much humidity. But thankfully the pavillion in the park was mostly shaded. A bit warmer than yesterday's. Had to make several trips carrying stuff to and from my car, because I always bring lots of helpful infrastructure with me such as megaphones, mats, stadium boxes, levels, and other goods. Today, we especially needed orange cones. Oh how we needed the orange cones.

- Sometimes tournaments get a younger crowd overall and you get a lot of kids running through tournament areas and making a bit of mess. That's what we had today. I had to bring out the orange cones to keep people from walking right through the tournament beystadium area.

- Doing two tournaments in one weekend is probably too much for me. I really wanted to go to both, and I did, but I'm very tired and probably sunburned, I forgot to wear a hat today. I'm going to be a mess for a few days.

- One blader ran an all Attack deck the entire tournament! BearsFTW25, I salute you! Not only did you have an incredibly competent attack deck that followed WBO rules, but it was appropriate level to the format, and your attack launch is extremely good. You wound up having some extremely challenging matches, but it was always a close one. He scored 2 points on me early on in our match, and I was able to ward off his attack in the third launch. After the reshuffle I made some lucky calls and wound up successfully defending against him, but it was truly a good match.

- We had an unattended child wander over to one of the tournament beystadiums and get in the way while we were trying to hold matches. We asked where their parents were several times, and only after about a minute and a half of asking around did their older brother collect them and usher them away from the tournament match area. Parents, We Are Not Your Babysitters. You cannot drop young minors off at a tournament and then go wandering away. If you are unable to keep your unattended minors from being a disruption, please do not bring them. We were getting close to having to call some sort of authorities to deal with a mislaid child, and I don't believe ANYONE wants that. We're really going to have to make parents read and sign a form indicating an understanding of the rules we have to give them. I don't see how we're going to be able to avoid that.

- Neither the bladers nor parents are reading the rules for the most part, so, we just have to make them read and sign a simplified version at the tournament.

- As a whole, the attendees are not generally listening. Not the parents, and not the bladers. We often have to call bladers to their stadiums numerous times. We often had to call EXPERIENCED BLADERS WHO KNOW BETTER to their stadiums several times. Yes, I get it, you're having fun in free play, or you've wandered off. That's great. But it is Hot outside and we have a lot of matches to get through, and if you can't spare the attention to keep an eye on the tournament matches you are supposed to have, then we are going to stop being kind and forgiving and patient and we're just going to issue the match loss, like Crisis warned everyone was a possible outcome if you did that, before the tournament started. Which some people missed the announcement of because they were late. Parents need to start listening for their bladers matches, the bladers themselves often choose not to listen.

- The tournament began around 12:30, and ended around 4. It was a 22 person tournament, so it was 5 round swiss. We had to wait for a bit, because by 11:30 only around 4 people were there. We had to keep stretching the start time out for all the people who messaged that they were almost there, but are late to almost every tournament. The finals took a long time, but not quite as long as the tiebreaker. Oh, the tiebreaker.

- CrisisCrusher07 had two decks available at the beystadiums for people who didn't have beys for the format, and about 4-5 people needed to use either those beys or the launchers.

- Since we had a bunch of newer bladers today, we got to see the full range of new blader issues. A bunch of fake parts, fake launchers, and one blader actually tried to use the Hasbro electric drivers in round 5. Those are still very much banned. Ripfire drivers. "Product Restrictions: Beyblade Micros, Rip Fire Beyblades, Digital Control Beyblades, the Mugen and Mugen L Drivers, and any Beyblade sideline/promotional product that is not compatible with the mainline Beyblade Burst series of tops are illegal"

- My deck for today was Master Spriggan Around Bearing', Judgement Diabolos1 0Bump (Black) Quick', and a return of my old favorite, Perfect Phoenix LC Hasbro Wheel High Extend+'. I knew that PP still did well in late GT, and I wanted to see if HXt+' would continue to make it excel. Well, it did fine in the first stage, but...

- I never ended up changing my deck once the whole time. Sure, I shifted the order, but I never changed it. I would say the weakest part of it was honestly PP. HXt+' is too high, it gets destabilized, and it can tilt a bit easily. It's MOSTLY great in same spin and opposite spin and even for defense, but only mostly. It's a jack of all trades and a master of none.

- I knew to expect a bunch of bent Vanguard discs in the tournament, because there's definitely a giant loophole in the rules right now that lets people bend the interior plastic of Vanguard downward to improve burst resistance. I saw it only used once myself, even though I did a lot of judging. It was kind of obvious on Bearing standard. I am told that maybe a few others used it as well. Bladers, I am disappointed in you when you do that; please have some integrity. I'm not going to name names.

- I saw a LOT of different layers at the tournament. Quite a bit of Sr3 among bladers who didn't understand the format, a lot of Lord, PP, Judgement, a ton of Master in both left and right, Imperial, Regalia, Apocalypse, and even a Glide ring that did exceptionally well. Some Zwei, not much, not successful either. I saw a lot of Drift and even Drift Metal being used which is CRAZY TO ME because of the burst risk. You gotta explain that to me.

- Even with PP being a bit of an experiment and one of my weaker beys, it was still enough to give me a 4-1 record. My attack launches were mostly good today, I had some good KOs. Friedpasta eventually got the better of me in round 5, but I had a fairly clear path to 2nd seed in the finals.

- The 8th seed in the finals, well, that was a bit tricky. We had a 3 way tie at a record of 3-2 and 7.0 buchholz between SPN_Z3R0, JCMakeEmBurst, and beymaster15963. To resolve this, we held a mini round robin between the three of them. SPN_Z3R0 beat beymaster15963, JCMakeEmBurst beat SPN_Z3R0, and then beymaster15963 beat JCMakeEmBurst. Huh. That's rare, but it happens. So, we did ANOTHER round of the mini round robin. Exact same results!!! Well that's troublesome. Finally in the third try, beymaster15963 defeated both of the other bladers and secured the 8th finals seed.

- Bladers, tournaments take a lot of time as is. The rules say you are supposed to go to the beystadium when called, and you have 3 minutes to select your beys. We are generally fairly flexible about this within reason. Sometimes bladers leave parts in their cases and have to go back for them. And sometimes they take a little long to make a decision. But today? Today went a little too far. I think in the future, especially for bladers who seem to have a problem with making those decisions, we are going to have to start telling them they have 1 minute to get to their beystadium with all their parts, 3 minutes to make a decision about the bey lineup, and time it, issuing a loss if they don't cooperate. It's not that hard, just make a decision! Even if it's the wrong decision, it's your decision and you tried your best! You not planning ahead doesn't mean everyone else has to sit around and wait for you.

- We had to start the finals bracket before figuring out who the 8th seed was. We knew who was in the 3 other matches, so, after HALF AN HOUR of tiebreaker round robin, we just had to start.

- I made it to the finals, 2nd seed. So did Friedpasta (undefeated in 1st stage), geetster99, CrisisCrusher07, The Supreme One, Allen Schaffer, raymond9911 (doesn't come to many tournaments but has made it to finals before), and eventually beymaster15963.

- TSO accidentally called the Moebius driver the Morbius driver. That is great. That's cannon now, it's the Morbius driver. I'm only calling it that.

- The finals really highlighted the weak and strong points of my deck, which did not change. I was able to use Master to near-sweep raymond, he didn't have any really solid counters to it and I saw that right away. Allen on the other hand, was prepared. He had PP on Morbius with Wall, which was exceedingly successful against my Master on Bearing'. I got a few points against him, It was either 4-5 or 3-5, but he beat me. My PP on HXt+' was not cutting the mustard at all in deck format.

- So, third place match against TSO, this was a weird one: TSO ONLY had left spin layers. I was confused. But I looked at them, looked at the tips, and thought to myself... I can PROBABLY take those on my Master. I was wrong it turns out. And it was a mixed bag. TSO had Master on Ratchet Bearing', I had Around Bearing'. I was not expecting Ratchet to had decent LAD but it surprisingly got more points from me than I from it. At the end I was 3-4, PP wasn't working... and I thought, the heck with it, go for a burst. Try Judgement. A risky gamble. Sadly, I botched the attack launch. A good match anyway. 4th place.

- DC 4th, TSO 3rd, beymaster15963 2nd, and Allen Schaffer 1st. No surprises there, these are good bladers! Beymaster got 2nd place the 2nd tournament in a row. Welcome to my special hell, I had a string of 2nd place finishes throughout 2019.

- This is an interesting format. It has the same difficulties as every other non-standard format in that most newer bladers don't read, but it has a lot of options as far as tips and layers, and even discs. I would definitely try it again, maybe vary up my combos and also avoid HXt+'.

- I had a lot of fun at today's tournament, but I'm very very tired, and a lot of participants are taking a lot of things for granted. We're giving them too much time and leeway, we're holding registration open longer even for people who are consistently late, and we're trying our best to keep the chaos organized so everyone can have a good tournament, and a lot of you are just making that really difficult. Please... stop making things difficult for the judges and organizers.

- We didn't get to ruin another birthday party, they intended to start late afternoon or early evening, and were setting up when we were leaving. Darn. I love ruining birthday parties with Beyblade tournaments.

DC needs to go lie down.
Thanks for another good report, DC! Agreed, it is now Morbius.
Morbius for life!

Sounds like a long day. I am sad I couldn’t come but glad the format is enjoyable.
"it's morbin time!" -Morbius, The Vampire Driver
Great write-up as always, appreciate the detail. I am glad GT is turning out to be the highly varied format I expected, and glad to see Maryland finally jump on the GTrain!

I do feel I should clarify that the vanguard bending thing isn't a loophole of that rule... it's actually the primary reason the rule is there. Not expressing and opinion on it either way, but it's not a loophole - it is intended functionality.

Anyway, Morbius Sweep let's go.
I like that I was the only mobius user XD DC didn't tell that my master was on all-might.... Respect the Almighty master diabolos
(Jun. 06, 2022  9:47 PM)Allen Schaffer Wrote: I like that I was the only mobius user XD DC didn't tell that my master was on all-might.... Respect the Almighty master diabolos

All might is almighty.
Pics:
https://flic.kr/s/aHBqjzTVZ3
Video of this event:
[video=youtube]Here’s a Tournament Format for HASBRO’s PRO SERIES https://youtu.be/Lbu61fnW-0M[/video]
It is a shame that people dont read the rules before hand. I kinda agree with the whole having people sign a sheet with the rules on it thing. If people dont want to read it on the actual site then they are gonna have to read it in person instead.