What the f*** is this Tournament Structure? — Esports World Cup

The initial matches have been released for the Esports World Cup for the 15 teams that are competing.

15 seems to be an odd number of participants to have in a Tournament and the way that EWC have handled it is even more baffling.

Can somebody explain to me first of all, why the 15 team Tournament? Just add an any team from any ESL ranking and get them in. It makes it so much easier.

You can essentially set up GSL groups and it opens up so many other Tournament systems that you can use instead of this absolute abomination.

It isn’t like that we don’t have the teams either. We have Team Liquid and 9z waiting up next for their ESL World Rankings slot, we could have picked up either of these teams.

Even if you wanted to work with a 15 team tournament, you could atleast bring it to Group Round-Robin play with 3 groups of 5 teams based on their seeding. Atleast, there would be some fairness to Jijiehao who would be fighting off elimination from the beginning.

However, even a 3 groups of 5 teams would be even more confusing especially if the teams that came 3rd all tied which would lead to even more Bo3s…

The System

So firstly, what tournament has ever had 15 teams and an 8 team playoff? The only system that I know which had more than half of their teams advanced to the playoffs would be the ESL Challenger League system.

That system had 10 of its 16 teams make the playoffs but if you finished higher during the season, you would be advanced further into the playoffs. For example, if you finished 1st and 2nd — you advanced to the 2nd round of the upper bracket. If you finished 7th to 10th, you’d be immediately placed in the lower bracket. Below is an example from the North American season.

The Esports World Cup doesn’t even have such a system. Infact, it’s way to deal with the system is to put 14 teams against each other in one BO3. The winner will go straight to the playoffs and the loser will go straight to the play-ins for the last spot.

The play-ins aren’t even double elimination either like most formats. They are single elimination just like the previous Gamer8 tournament.

It is so incredibly punishing to a team that loses a Bo3 and so rewarding to a team that wins a one-off Bo3. The team that loses must win 3 Bo1s straight to make the playoffs.

There has been no tournament without a previous round-robin that has had such a dire consequence for losing one BO1.

Also, you read that right. A BEST OF ONE. Jijiehao could fly in, essentially lose a BO1 in 35 minutes and fly home. I thought it was well established that at least the elimination and progression games were all BO3.

The winner gets to put their feet up and potentially already research against the team that they would likely be seeded against. Why? You see that if 7 teams are in the playoffs and only the last team would need to be decided.

There would likely be 6 teams who know who their next opponent would be based on their seeding because the play-in team would be seeded at Number 8.

The only team that wouldn’t know their team that they would vs would be the highest seeded team as they would vs the Play-Ins Winner.

To make matters worse, what was the thought process on relegating Jijiehao immediately to play-ins? Seeding? Ranking? Drawing straws?

Jijiehao received an immediate disadvantage without any ability to fight for it. At least in the ECL format, you had an ability to fight for it by having better Round Robin results.

Now let’s take this from a viewer perspective, a lot of the big draw teams wouldn’t play a game until the playoffs.

Effectively, your Play-ins will be filled with teams with very little draw value. The main draw value would be from their specific regions such as Furia/MIBR, FlyQuest, Complexity/M80 and the Mongolz. It wouldn’t be a worldwide draw such as FaZe, G2 and Vitality.

Let’s be honest, I don’t think many people will watch Sashi v MIBR that is outside of Brazil. If there was a round-robin system, you might get a lot of people watching Mouz v Spirit whenever it came along.

This is why I don’t get this Esports World Cup format. It is anti-integrity for Jijiehao and seemingly anti-viewer as the big draw teams don’t play until an 8 team playoff.