Let's start with some groundwork. The following chart contains information for STours 37 and 36, which both used 6-4-2 time slots. It contains the total number of points awarded in each qualifying phase, along with the percent of that total awarded on Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays. In addition, because I am going to be sorting players according to their regions and so the full sample is going to be unmanageable, I needed a cutoff. So I'm using the top 169 placements from STour 37 (everyone with at least 10 points) and the top 187 placements in STour 36 (everyone with at least 6 points), and sorting their Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays accordingly. That's arbitrary beyond the fact that I wanted a large sample where I could identify most players and I wanted roughly similar sample sizes. Anyone who wants to yell at me for a lack of statistical rigour is free to do so).
As you can see, STour 37 had a different scoring system with more total points, but the proportions are basically the same. Sundays are the smallest, Fridays are a bit larger than Sundays, Saturdays are clearly the biggest.
Now, we'll divide those totals according to their regions. I was able to identify a region for everyone in the STour 37 sample but just all but 4 for STour 36, so there's admittedly a bit of error here. There's going to be noise, since this is only a two year sample, but let's see if there's anything useful here:
In an attempt to prevent your eyes from glazing over, I've highlighted the parts that I find interesting here. Let's deal with them in turn.
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in blue, you can compare how the shape of each country's production compares with each other's. The sample from the Americas puts up points in basically the same shape as the average; Sunday is the least productive day, Friday is slightly better, and Saturday is the most productive. Europe, meanwhile, has a similar shape too.
It's Asia and Oceania where things differ, however; in both years, Sunday was the most productive day for those demographics, with Friday being consistently poor and Saturday fluctuating. The Sunday results are driven by India, Bangladesh, and Asia (which notably contains various players from Pakistan and the Middle East), and Indian players in particular illustrates that this slot is beneficial because it allows them to start before midnight
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in red, you can see that these samples of the top 170 and 187 players in the qualifying phase respectively line up with the overall tour player demographics. This is a point that Amaranth made in this post, to illustrate that representation of players from Asia and Oceania wasn't actually that off. I started this post off by arguing that these regions make up about 10% of the tournament playerbase, and here they're sitting in the 9-10% range. That's about what we'd expect, right? Except...
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in green, you see that in both years players from Asia and Oceania underperform their sample size; they get fewer points than we'd expect from just looking at their raw representation.
This makes sense; any Asian and Oceanian players in this tournament are playing at brutal hours, as should be obvious from looking at the schedule and has been repeatedly mentioned in every iteration of this conversation over the past several years. If nothing else, the takeaway should concern how exactly it's misleading to just focus on the best-performing players from these regions to assess if there's an issue. There are going to be a few players that ruin their sleep schedule and grind enough to make it, even with unfavourable hours. That doesn't change that there is evidence that players from these regions, in general underperform in the tournament whose ruleset makes no attempt to accommodate them.
To some extent I'm wasting my time here. The people who consistently understate the extent to which accessibility is a real issue for this tournament are a vocal minority; it's pretty obvious that STour's setup is highly unfavourable for players from Asia and Oceania. The more common view seems to be, rather, that this tournament's schedule has been adjusted several times, and the attempts to do so have led to reduced attendance overall.
To that, I argue that the current schedule might be optimal for maximizing participant count, but it's clearly not optimal for maximizing participation among the tournament playerbase. If a reduction in overall entrants is an unacceptable price to pay for this tournament to properly accommodate 10% of the players who can actually contend for a playoff spot, then it seems like some other solution is warranted. But before I move on from this point, let's take a deeper dive into one of the tournaments in which accommodations were made. Is it true that they didn't work?
Okay, so let's get the obvious out of the way. Numbers were down here, they would rebound in STour 36. You already know this. It's also probably obvious, although it's worth pointing out, that the culprit was the "Friday" time absolutely collapsing, which of course was a Saturday 9 am Eastern time slot instead. You'll also notice that the Sunday slot was the strongest here, and that makes sense to me; if the "Friday" time is no longer a viable time slot for the Americas, then they're going to need to find their two slots elsewhere. That wasn't enough to avoid the net loss in participants. We know this.
So let's talk about the interesting parts:
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in red, we can see that in our "top performer" sample, which here is the sample of the 169 players with 5+ points to keep a comparable sample size, the Americas are underrepresented compared to the 50-55% of the tournament playerbase that they represent. No surprises there. What's interesting is that it's actually European and African players who benefited. With North and South Americans not picking up wins here, the +0 to +3ish time zones were overrepresented here. This makes sense too; 9 am -4 is 2 pm in London and 3 pm in Paris, which suddenly gives them three viable timeslots to choose from.
But the increase in representation for players from Asia and Oceania never came; both the raw numbers and the proportions are worse than they would be in either STour 36 or 37.
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in green, we see how the points were distributed. Despite the poor representation of players from the Americas, they picked up a greater proportion of the points than you'd expect from their representation: still clearly shows that Americans were turned away with 2-2.5 viable times, but they were still the best-performing demographic. It's the Asian and Oceanian players who cratered even further. Why? I'll propose a few factors, but first, let's cover the last point.
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in blue, you can see the shape of the point production for each region, and here the trends are clear.
The Americas actually got a lot of value out of that Sunday slot, which is still a great time for them, but with much of the hemisphere locked out of the new Saturday morning slot, they got nothing out of it. And second,
players from Asia and Oceania did, in fact, use that new extra Saturday timeslot. They're not huge numbers, but there were in fact Indian players that benefited from that time slot, like TDR and So Noisy. India generally did much better in STour 36, and we'll get into that later, but of the players who got at least 6 points,
only one of them got any points on Friday at all, and that's vk with 2. And while Piyu put up a monstrous 15 points on Fridays in STour 37, Maverick Shooters's 5 were the only others. Meanwhile, Oceanian players got a ton of value out of that slot, Saturday midnight at local time. damien the genius, Leavers, Chloe and DugZa all got a ton of value out of that slot.
Basically, even though the overall numbers make it look like players from Asia and Oceania didn't benefit from this slot, what actually happened is that the gains they got from the changed Friday slot were real, but didn't make up for getting essentially no production in the Saturday and Sunday slots.
So what happened here? We know that the STour 34 times were catastrophic for participation in the Western Hemisphere, but why did Asian and Oceanian players get so little benefit? Well, here are a few thoughts:
- India is one of the playerbases (alongside China) that would benefit the most from such a slot today, and their playerbases just weren't as strong at the time. Aside from pj, most of India's best players weren't yet threats in 2022; NoName, vk, Piyu, Maverick Shooters and IPF are all players with strong performances in extremely unfavourable STour schedules in 2024 and 2025, and that's not even including myjava and Dj Breloominati. This is also a fairly obvious thing to point out by looking at WCOP performance; Team India is stronger now than it's ever been.
- It'd be easy to sit here and say that what happened is that India and Oceania benefited from benefiting on beating up on competition largely devoid of players from the Americas while just not being good enough to beat them when they actually showed up. I think that's highly reductive. For one, no one would ever suggest that Europe's playerbase is weak, and now they had a Saturday afternoon slot to play in. The total participation in that Friday slot was lower, but anyone getting points there was still facing strong players. I'm going to avoid attaching screenshots here because this post is already massive as is, but, feel free to look up the brackets.
- Lower participation numbers in a single slot means that that slot now awards fewer points. This is the issue with all of these plans, and the result is that if you want to actually qualify, you need to do well in the other time slots.
- It's not realistic for most players to qualify for STour while only playing one slot per week, and even those who benefited from a Friday slot with fewer Americans now had to deal with increased competition in another time slot where, once again, they were playing at unviable hours. Remember, the other "good" timeslot for Indian players is 11:30pm on Sunday. The other "good" timeslot for Australian players is 7am Sunday.
If your fear is that I'm cherry-picking a single tournament from 33-35, I didn't get more data because that's even more time-consuming here. For what it's worth, though, there were 15 players from Asia/Oceania out of the top 179 point-getters, for 8.38%. Low, and if we look at the distribution of points, they got 8.03% of the points in that sample. And again, the shape is about what you'd expect. The best players from these regions benefited from a time that actually catered to them; ChrisPBacon qualified largely by racking up a ton of points in that 6am -4 slot, and while pj didn't qualify, the majority of their points came from there too. Because it cut out the vast majority of Americans, though, it was worth far fewer points.
