Well, it looks terrible when you're the last 5 posts in your own thread, but it wouldn't make sense to edit the info into the older posts.
Gosh, that was a fun tournament yesterday. Tiring, but fun. Thanks again to the judges, the parents, and the bladers themselves!
I wrote notes. All the notes! Most of them are positive and reassuring!
- We had 28 of the 32 registrants show up before registration closed! A new record! Unfortunately, we had 7 people on the waitlist. It felt awful to turn away 3 of those people. In the past the tournaments I've organized have had way more no-shows, so a waitlist of 6 people wasn't an issue. This isn't a problem I can fix; the venue simply cannot support a larger number of participants, it's already fairly crowded as is. Each blader participant usually brings 1-2 people with them... sometimes as many as 4. It gets very crowded. You should all keep a closer eye on tournament announcements and register early to guarantee participation.
- We had 4 registrants either not show up or show up after registration closed. I think there was only one who showed up after it closed, and unfortunately I couldn't let them into the tournament at that point, the brackets were full and the people on the waitlist were on time. Plus I was in the middle of getting ready to announce the first round matches. At least this time they didn't try to argue with me about it! As I mentioned earlier, I'm keeping records of MD/PA bladers who make a habit of no-showing to tournaments without an explanation, and for some of these 4, its their second offense. They will be contacted, and there may be warning percentages involved. I'm starting to think that some of you bladers aren't getting your parents/guardians/etc. permission prior to registering for these tournaments! You really should.
- Master layer is here in the US now, and it's having interesting effects! It's a highly defensive layer in left spin, and it seems to benefit from higher tips. Expect to see this layer again in upcoming tournaments!
- As far as I can tell, for 19 Bladers, this was their first tournament! It's always exciting to get a new group of bladers in. Although what's even better is when you come back to tournaments in the future! Even if you didn't do well at today's tournament, we hope you had fun, and we hope you learn from the experience, and we know you'll probably do better next time. So please, attend more WBO tournaments in the future. Practice makes permanent!
- Although I wasn't judging, I did notice a general lack of the main attack layers, Zwei and Judgement. This made it a lot safer to use stamina and opposite spin layers. This time around,
wasn't running his BeyShop, so bladers didn't have easier access to attack types. I wonder if we see more attack layers when the BeyShop is around? I'm guessing the answer is yes.
- Balkesh B3 is still very viable. My one first stage loss was against a B3, I was using Imperial. It's not amazing against Judgement or Zwei, but Balkesh B3 is still a strong layer against many others. Don't write it off yet.
- My finals loss was to . Which is very on-brand for both of us. I'll defeat you again one of these days!
- I'm sorry about having to cone off the stairs behind the organizers section. People had been using it for a tournament and a half to watch the matches, and aside from being a fire hazard or impediment to the building owners in the office upstairs, or bladers missing their match announcements because they were behind the megaphone on the stairs, I didn't really have a problem with that. Unfortunately today that changed. Someone accidentally dropped a bey down into the crawlspace under the stairs. I had to get the building owners to come have a look and give us permission to move things around between first stage and the finals. Fortunately we were able to get the bey, but I'm going to have to keep everyone off the stairs in the future; aside from being a place where beys can become lost, they're a little uneven at spots, and I'm going to be much less worried if I just keep people off them.
- Today I came to the realization that some people don't understand that there's an entire forum thread underneath the tournament announcements. I can post details, I can answer questions, and some people just won't scroll down enough to see there's a ton of answers available. I don't have a fix for that, I don't think it's something I can fix. Certainly a downer though.
- I'm still having trouble getting people to quiet down and pay attention during announcements. I can repeat an announcement 3 times into a megaphone, but many times people will mishear their names, and others won't hear their name at all. I called one blader to a match about 8 times before they finally showed up, on the verge of forfeiting that match. I know you're all excited to have a lot of blading going on in the freeplay area, but until your match is called for the round, I'm hoping you will try to pay more attention to when your match is! And when you hear an announcement on the megaphone, please stop launching, stop talking, just have a quiet sit and listen for a bit.
- Please stop asking me "When do I get to have my match". Asking isn't going to make your match start any faster. It makes it start slower.
- This was the first tournament where I had bladers leave midway. disappeared after round 3, and disappeared after round 4. If you have to leave due to circumstances outside of your control, that's fine, just tell us. If you want to leave because you're not doing so well, although I don't agree with that idea because you aren't going to get any better if you try and also because Swiss tournaments match you against people with similar win records so it's only going to get easier if you keep trying, at least tell us you're leaving. When you leave without telling us? It slows things down and delays matches because we are trying very much to find you for your match, and you aren't there. I'm assembling a new list for people who bail on tournaments mid-way without an explanation. Penalties will be assessed if it happens more than once. Please just let us know if you're leaving, that's all we ask.
- The finals calculation today wasn't all that stressful. had it all figured out in mere moments, while I insisted on going through the results carefully, and it turned out she was completely right and I should just listen. 
In a 32 person tournament, everyone who goes 4-1 is likely to go to the finals. We had 1 person go 5-0 and 6 people go 4-1, which is rare and amazing. So we had 8 3-2 bladers vying for a single 8th place slot in the finals. After determining that there weren't significant issues with higher buchholz or people moving up or down based on other matches against 3-2 bladers, we actually had to have a tiebreaker match between and . It was an exciting match!
- The finals today were interesting for a couple of reasons. We had 3 new and returning bladers make it to the finals for the first time. But for the other 5, well, they were no strangers to finals and deck format, I just wasn't expecting them all to meet in the finals. This tournament had one organizer (me) and 4 judges (, , , and ). Normally, I would say about 2-4 of us will make it to the finals. We're experienced at Beyblade, we have good parts, some of us have been playing for years, and we're all really quite good. Occasionally we'll run into hurdles and first stage and not make to the finals, it happens to me a lot. It even happens to sometimes! But today? All 5 of the judges/organizers made it to the finals. Which isn't surprising, it's just rare, that's all. And usually once there, we run into each other in the quarterfinals and defeat each other! Such is Beyblade. But today? Aside from me getting knocked out by Yami in the quarterfinals (hahaha, if it wasn't him Hello321 would've done it in the semifinals), the 4 judges were positively ruthless and by the semifinals it was down to just them. To clarify, this is rare, and I know it looks sketchy when it happens, but I was really glad to see them all make it to the top 4. They've earned it.
- There's a recurring question that comes up every now and then, "is it fair for judges and organizers to be participants?" And my answer is... shrug. These tournaments don't run themselves! It's a lot of hard work to judge and organize. And no one's being paid to do this, this is all volunteer run. So, I at least will absolutely never apologize for participating. I prefer to think of it as "We are decently challenging opponents and you will have to work hard to defeat us." We're good at this, and we enjoy playing, and we won't give that up. If we couldn't participate, we wouldn't run it, so please, just train well to defeat us.
- After the tournament, a few of us stuck around to try TSO's Draft format with deck format rules. I'd never heard of this before, and I was slow to understand, because I was very tired and hungry. But it's actually kind of a cool format! You alternate banning specific layer use for both bladers until 3 are banned, and then 3 discs, and then 3 drivers, and then from the remaining unbanned parts, you make a 3 bey deck (1 bey at a time, revealing between each so that you can decide if the next bey should counter something your opponent has made) and then have a deck format match. I did fairly well in this format! The strategy is interesting. I always made sure Lord and Bearing were banned, but I tried to change up what was banned based on the opponent. However, it's a format where having more parts directly benefits you. In my case, when Zwei and Judgement were on the ban list, I could always fall back on Dead Hades. I had enough parts that I almost always had backups available for any kind of bey I wanted to make. It is not necessarily a fair format, but it is fun. I don't know that we could do official tournaments for it.
- I'm probably going to let one of the other judges organize the next event at BSFS, I'm low on people-herding energy and I need a few months to recharge. I'll be there to judge, and handle any concerns with the building managers, but someone else can organize.
- The next tournament I do will likely be Zero-G format or Metal Fight Limited. Sorry folks, but I've started collecting a few MFB beys and I want to give them a try! Don't worry, with the surprisingly rapid tournament tempo we've had in December and January in the Northeast/Central Atlantic (would you believe I'm participating in 6 tournaments this month???) you should not be worried about missing out on a single tournament just because you don't have MFBs; wait for the next one!