Guide: Pokémon Tournaments

Ah, tournaments. What would be of a popular game without tournaments? It's one of the main reasons people like to battle: to participate of a tournament and get to know others who have the same interests, or just to see who's better. Anyway, this guide will give you tips and directions on hosting good tournaments.

One thing to be noted is that this guide will NOT _SOLELY_ cover online tournaments, but will also try to cover real-life tournaments. It's also VERY IMPORTANT to note that real-life tournaments require a totally different approach from their online counterparts, and this will be explained throughout the guide.

Choosing rules

In order to make your tournament unique, you might wish to adopt unique rules rather than using the same standard set. It's a bit like chaos's website guide, you need to find a "rule niche" for your tournament, something that nobody has tried before. Not really a must-follow guideline, although it does help :P

Tips on choosing rules:

1- Make sure the ruleset doesn't shift the standard metagame too much as to overpower certain kinds of Pokémon. If you're a complete beginner and still wouldn't like to go with the standard rules, try hosting an Ubers tournament, or a UU one, as these rulesets are widely known.

2- NEVER, EVER, make a ruleset with the purpose of rendering your most hated strategy unusable. This should be a consequence of the rules, but NOT their reason.

3- Refrain from overloading your ruleset with non-standard clauses. Only one or two will suffice you and won't annoy the competitors away.

4- Avoid banning Pokémon or moves unless it's part of a standard clause. This goes along with tip #1.

If you are hosting a real-life tournament, always remember that TIME IS A CRITICAL ISSUE. This alone can very much affect the rules you are going to choose. It's also important to note that real-life battle turns take fucking FOREVER to finish, affecting even more the decision of your tournament's rules. The reason for this is that you can't disable animations nor can you set the message speed faster on linked battles (the latter only if you are playing GSC or either Ruby or Sapphire versions - you can set a faster message speed on linked battles for all the other Advance versions, but it'll be for naught if the opponent has a slower setting). There are some solutions for these problems, each with its advantages and drawbacks:

1- Make 3 on 3 battles. It's Nintendo's standard real-life tournament format, adopted with extreme fidelity in Brazil. This greatly reduces the average time of a battle, but they will still last a good 10 to 15 minutes. Also, the community generally frowns upon such format. You could try and make this valid only for the early matches, but still, not a very good solution.

2- Disallow recovering-only moves. Brazilian tournaments often use this together with solution #1, reducing a little more the average time of the battles. Still not good due to the same reasons above.

3- Use Stadium/Colosseum/XD. These pieces of software are plain AWESOME for tournaments. Not only can you enforce time limits, completely solving time issues, but you can also enforce a lot of standard rules. Plus, battle turns are somewhat faster, as the messages are displayed together with the move animations. The downside? You are gonna need a good amount of consoles to fully realize the potential of this solution, or it won't make much time-wise difference from the standard way. Then again, it's not that difficult to get many N64s/Gamecubes together; the real trouble comes down to the transport of the TV sets, as they are generally too heavy to carry around. Screen projectors seem a good alternative, as they're generally smaller and lighter, but the really good ones are just as accessible as TV sets.

4- Span the tournament among multiple days. Another excellent way of dealing with time, albeit more suited to online tournaments. You need to check, however, the availability of doing such a thing (explained later).

Competitors, wins and losses

If you are a complete beginner, you'll want to make very restrict tournaments so you can get the hang of it. Do NOT try to host a tournament with many people, or you'll quickly and easily lose control of it, especially in real-life tournaments AND if you're doing everything by yourself (which will most certainly be your current condition if you're just beginning).

Anyway, the easiest way to host a tournament is the elimination layout: if you lose, you're out. Again, beginners should stick with this until they're better experienced, although other kinds of layouts don't really require much brain to understand and implement. Automatizing tournaments is not required, but helps greatly, especially for Swiss tournaments , where all competitors must play against each other at least once and points are awarded for wins/draws.

Logging battle outcomes

This is mostly for online tournaments, as it's generally more difficult to know who won, lost or broke rules. The absolute best way of handling this is asking the competitors to submit you Netbattle Replays, which are very hard to forge. Everything's easy if it's done on a forum system, such as Smogon's. In real-life tournaments, a pen and a piece of paper are your obvious best friends.

Handling disconnectors

If you are hosting an online tournament on a simulator, then you can instruct the competitors to wait until their opponent reconnects or the battle times out if he/she disconnects from the battle.

This is not the case on a real-life match, because if the connection between the GBAs (or between GBA and NGC) is disrupted, it'll end immediately without the opportunity of resuming it. There are many, many different views on how this should be solved (I'd personally restart the match, no problems), therefore this should be prevented at all costs. However, it's easy to know if the disconnection was on purpose or not: if the competitor has clearly disrupted the link (detaching the cable or WA or turning off the GBA), then he/she loses. Plus, competitors should be instructed that, on the event of a disconnection, they should leave their GBAs UNTOUCHED, as it helps determine if a competitor has turned off his/her GBA in order to disrupt the battle.

Picking dates

Now that you have everything set, it's time to decide whether it's feasible. In other words, you should have sufficient date, time and place (and money to an extent) resources to make it happen. This goes double for real-life tournaments.

Let's start with the first two. If you are hosting an online tournament, you'll certainly want to span it among several days, as it can be made very easy for the competitors to arrange a battle. Single-day online tournaments are a VERY common faux pas, as (1) you force the competitors to stay in front of the computer for a long period of time, and (2) you can't assume every competitor lives at the same time zone as yours. Hell, it's an ONLINE tournament, and that means every person in the whole damn planet may participate.

Real-life tournaments are commonly hosted in a single day. Very rarely you'll want a tournament which spans two or more days, and if you do, they should be CONTIGUOUS. As stated before, tournaments during 2+ days help mitigate time problems, since you may loosen the amount of time the matches should take. Another reason you should avoid multiple-day real-life tournaments (2 days more than suffice you) is that they will have to span through weekdays (unless it's on the holiday period, of course), apart from place (and maybe money) concerns, which will be discussed in the next section.

And most importantly: DON'T EVER underestimate the power of INTERMISSIONS. Real-life tournaments are commonly hosted at noon, so do not force your competitors to stay there all the time. Give them around 20 minutes for every intermission so they can take a deep breath from all the battling and go eat something just in case.

Picking a place

You can't have a tournament without deciding first where it should be, lol. The place where the tournament should take place solely depends on its size: 8- to 32-man tournaments may very well be hosted at the comfort of your home :P

In case of bigger tournaments, or if you want to host multiple tournaments on a single day, you may want to rent a public space, such as school gyms. In Brazil, the bigger tournaments are all hosted as part of bigger events, generally anime- and/or game-related.

Make also sure to pick a place where other people won't be bothered by the extreme cheering of the spectators.

Prizes and money

Now there, wouldn't it suck to take part on a tournament, win it and get nothing in return? Okay, not quite, but you get the idea.

If you're hosting a widely-known tournament and/or you have some sort of reputation when it comes to hosting tournaments, such as the Official Smogon Tournament, it's never a bad idea to think of prizes for the winners (and runner-ups if you feel like it). Be sure to give something worthwhile, like the elusive Japanese Colosseum Bonus-disc. Even real cash works.

Speaking of money, finding and buying the prizes is never easy, and at times you may need to resort to sponsorship, even if you already earn money. Again, it all depends on the size of the tourney and how many people should be prized. Usually a prize for the winner is enough.

Still about money, do refrain from charging fees from the competitors, especially if your tournament is part of another event. You can make something optional, though, e.g. bringing a certain amount of non-perishable (does that word even exist) food so as to donate them to charities.

Announcing your tournament

Rules set and resources measured, there is just one thing left to do: announce your tournament. For online tournaments, it's fairly simple: you can use forum systems to announce your tournament. However, don't go doing so recklessly: always check the forum rules beforehand, as different forums have different policies regarding tournament announcements, therefore this should also be planned together with everything else.

Real-life tournaments are more difficult to announce due to less accessibility to the Internet. If you want to gather as many people as possible, then you should always plan the worst-case scenario. Sure, you can announce your tournament on the Internet, but do not SOLELY depend on it, as not every Pokémon trainer has access to computers, and if they do, chances are they won't even be aware of the forums you go to (just to note, the Smogon website and forums aren't quite well-known amongst the casual Brazilian players. And worse, some may not even know about NetBattle). Again, sponsorships will come in handy if you don't have enough resources to announce it yourself. In most cases, renting a public space (especially if it's a part of a bigger event) will just suffice you.

Final words

As of now, real-life tournaments are very popular (at least in Brazil, dunno about the rest of the world). However, the figures are more than subject to change upon DP arrival, but only time will tell if DP will really have online connectivity as we expect it to be (similar to NetBattle, that is). Even so, there's something in real-life battles that can never be done online: body language. This alone makes battles tough and exciting, as it's very difficult to hide your feelings during a battle, meaning it's strikingly easy to predict every fart your opponent may do. A psychologist Pokémon trainer would just stand out to be honest.

Also, thank you for your reading this. To tell the truth, I was partially inspired by chaos's guide on making websites, and, having some experience on co-hosting real-life tournaments, I felt like writing this guide. Anyway, I'm very open to suggestions on improving this mainly because I'm not very well known in the international Pokémon community (although I'd be open for suggestions anyway), so if anyone has better experience on tournaments, both online and real, or spotted grammar errors and such, don't hesitate to reply.

Happy Pokémoning.
-- AMF, and I'm not related to bowling, mind you.
 
You should add something about Loosers Brackets, because they are very good for those who get out of the tourney by hax, for example, and get another chance to get back.

But the guide is awesome. Good job.
 

skarm

I HAVE HOTEL ROOMS
is a Tournament Director Alumnusis a Site Content Manager Alumnusis a Battle Simulator Admin Alumnusis a Smogon Discord Contributor Alumnusis a Top Contributor Alumnusis an Administrator Alumnus
Its a shame Brazil can make all these tournaments fine but North America can't!
 
Anyway, the easiest way to host a tournament is the "mata-mata" layout (I don't know the English name of this): if you lose, you're out. Again, beginners should stick with this until they're better experienced, although other kinds of layouts don't really require much brain to understand and implement. Automatizing tournaments is not required, but helps greatly, especially for "pontos corridos"-like tournaments (again, I don't know if there's a specific name for this in English, but in this case all competitors must play against each other at least once and points are awarded for wins/draws).
The first one would be called "single-elimination," and I'm not sure about the second one.
 
In the prize section, perhaps it's just I'm too used to fighting game tournaments but it seems pointless to use a prize system other than using an entry fee from all competitiors to create a pot for the winner. That way it's easy on the host, and the tournament 'means' something since you paid yourself in.

And hey if the tournament's big enough you can have a set up with 1st taking home 70% of the pot, 25% for second and maybe the entry fee or 5% for third. Bought prizes suck, since the winner might not want that prize.
 
I already claimed it in the subforum. I just haven't had time with school, but this weekend looks empty.
 

Great Sage

Banned deucer.
I took the liberty of fixing a few typos, adding the English names for the types of tournaments, and generalizing a few things.
 

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