Recent content by dk

losing a losers bracket round results in elimination from the tournament. losing in winners bracket drops you to the losers bracket. losing in losers is an elimination. in grand finals, the winners bracket finalist basically drops to losers bracket if the losers bracket finalist wins the first...

the round losses do not need to be consecutive. if you win winners round 1, lose in winners round 2, then win many rounds through losers bracket, then lose in losers finals, you'd be eliminated then and there in losers finals. as another example, in a 64-man bracket where everyone starts in...

tournaments with winners and losers brackets are double elimination, which contrast single elimination. double elimination tournaments (if there's no prior pools rounds with different formats) start everyone in the winners bracket. this functions like a normal bracket, except for the fact that...

Lady Bug vs Pideous Gilbert arenas vs Skyrio Malekith vs Tizio Potente Ao 199 vs Groudon SFG vs Void i'm going to go with an innovative predictions style where i'll hard commit to one entire side or the other for each set of predictions. left side has malekith and i'm personally a fan of lady...

whats the argument here? do we just politely admire old metagames with their stupid shit respectfully left untouched in observation of some kind of religious obligation to do so? no shit it's different---it's a lot more fun. seriously, go play it. i havent had this much fun with singles in a...

what the hell is P.I.S.S.

sleep is stupid and contributes to ridiculous amounts of variance. sleep is even more stupid in formats without preview. sleep clause is a nonsense contrivance that completely contradicts the site's tiering framework. remove sleep. a website full of competitive strategy game enthusiasts that...

the veto thing finch outlined makes plenty of sense. as the ladder finds new ways to make itself worse, it only makes sense that the nebulous mass of unpaid labor that we call smogon bureaucracy grows in power to keep it the madness in check. we already trust tier leaders with guiding bans; this...

thanks for the posts thus far. i think the criticisms of ban packages/banning multiple things at once as an actual formal tiering action are entirely fair and make a number of good points. in light of that, i think it makes the most sense to try to push the thread towards discussing the...

prize pots was the attempt to address this problem, but given the variables in terms of how much the pot actually motivates honest tries at building ban package meta-specific teams (the pot may not end up big enough, busy participants may outright not have time to build for a test meta, exchange...

while this backtracks on what i'd view as ideal, the ban package trialing could still serve as a way to drum up serious interest in just getting the ball rolling on doing the standard piecemeal 1-by-1 ban process while keeping the ban package hitlist in mind long-term. if you trial the complete...

10/24/2025 edit: please see this post before replying. thanks. I'll try to keep it short since half the time policy review feels like it's populated by highschoolers that are too used to padding out assignments with fluff to hit word count requirements Anyway, this is a genuine issue in...

Crunch Spdef Hippo: :hippowdon: Hippowdon (F) @ Leftovers Ability: Sand Stream EVs: 252 HP / 4 Atk / 252 SpD Careful Nature - Stealth Rock - Slack Off - Earthquake - Crunch after building some wonky fat with foreseeable gengar problems, I threw crunch on spdef hippo on a whim and was weirdly...

can't you fit toxic somewhere instead of relying on counter clef for pert

can i ask why so much attention goes into laboriously evaluating obvious stupid-but-technically-maybe-borderline cases over and over? isn't the purpose of tiering to make metagames as competitive as they reasonably can be? i feel like tiering on this site suffers from an insistence on asking...