RESULTS: SauerDuels #25

Disclaimer: Dear Reader, the following text (and maybe also the disclaimer itself) contains my (Tophy’s) personal opinion and also some forms of satire. Just in case you don’t know the exact meanings of these two words, please look it up in a dictionary of your choice. Thanks in advance!


Introduction (actually a math lesson):

The latest iteration of our beloved SauerDuels tournament has broken through the magical number of 25. Literally the first thing that came to my sick and weird mind when I saw this number was “At which date would we be celebrating SauerDuels #100?”. – When would it be most likely? So, after some calculations and many wild guesses, I came to the conclusion that SauerDuels #100 would, if everything goes right, take place on December 4th, 2022! If, by then, the world hasn’t already been destroyed by nuclear weapons or some coincidental gamma-ray burst, we should give it a try! – There’s definitely no way around it!

Now, what to say? On Sunday, January 27th, 2019, we saw 16 effic players with amazing skills and a great map pool consisting of

  • aard3c
  • academy
  • duel8
  • frozen
  • legazzo
  • memento
  • ot
  • simplicity
  • turbine

As I already said, we’ve had effic; exactly, the 9th time from the beginning of SauerDuels. More on that later…


About the tournament:

The tournament-mechanism is called “double-elimination” and basically works like this:
It features a winner and a loser-bracket. Every player starts in the winner-bracket. Players losing a duel in the winner-bracket move to the loser-bracket. If a player loses a game in the loser-bracket, they’re out of the tournament. At the end, the winner of the winner-bracket will fight against the winner of the loser-bracket.


Awards:

Well, dear reader, I can feel that you can’t wait to witness my award-giving-show. Those who read a post of mine for the first time: I would like to briefly introduce my three categories: The first award is called stunning performance. It’s given to players who simply played very well and performed on a high level. The second one – biggest surprise of the tournament – is dedicated to participants who simply exceeded (my) expectations. The last one, the award for the most memorable game, is an award that is supposed to commemorate the game that attracted me the most. “Attracting” is a very broad word in this case: It might mean the game was extraordinarily THRILLING, really CLOSE, extraordinarily “RAPEY” or simply HILARIOUS (extremely FUNNY). The explanation of this one might contain traces of satire. So watch out, satire is likely to be misunderstood easily… Oh man, I talk too much. Some of you probably passed away from boredom. Anyway, enjoy my prize-giving!

The award for the most stunning performance(s) goes to everyone this time. – I feel like everyone has tried their best so why not honour that? (Shhhh, not to say I’m trying to easily get me out of this business because I don’t know who to award… :])

The winner for the award for the biggest surprise of the tournament was very easy to determine: I undoubtedly award Tamin0. He did a great job in several games, especially in the legendary simplicity match vs Alli. Congratulations, bro! Not to forget about notas’, let’s say, “hilarious” comments during the simplicity game.

I want to give my last regular award for the most memorable game to the second game of the best-of-three finals. Well, I don’t want to explain the finals at this point since that is the job of another paragraph below, but I can tell that starch and raffael played a REALLY close game on academy; not to forget that we saw one overtime in addition to a very close win by one for starch.


Finals:

This time, the finalists weren’t anything of a surprise, honestly: I already mentioned that our two final-guys were raffael and starch. Both are great players, both playing for great clans. In my opinion, it’s comparable to a rivalry between w00p and sp4nk… Who is better? Which clan is overall better? And, most importantly, who’s the best effic player of all time?

The first game was played on – no surprise – turbine, which was actually less thrilling than I had expected: Overall, raffael had a constant lead of 3 – 4 during the whole game. In fact, the end score isn’t a surprise: Raffael won by three with a good-looking score of 66 – 63.

Since raffael had been eliminated in the last game of the winner bracket, it was his turn to pick a map: He picked academy which seemed to be a clever move because academy is known to be his strongest map. So where would he be able to crush starch, if not on academy? Yeah, well… not a bit of it! raffael somehow managed to lose by one frag and starch enforced a tiebreaker.

The tiebreaker was picked by starch and was played on ot, apparently a starch-map. Even here, we were surprised! raffael showed a very solid dominance over starch and finished him with a score of 66 – 63 which we’d already seen on turbine. Great games, guys!


Scoreboard and what people think about it

Let’s take a look at the scoreboard: We see raffael, once again, towering over everyone else. starch earns his first silver medal, and the 3rd place goes to hades. An honorable mention is lagout who placed 4th. Well done! And congratulations to raffael for winning his 4th effic title at SauerDuels!!!

Alright, you’ve already endured a lot of my babbling and some may already have fallen asleep since my write-ups are more boring and washed-out than your granny’s Sunday bingo round.
Because of that, I’d like to present you a few summaries by some participants:

Lokio:

I thought this last tournament was pretty great! It was awesome to see such a high level of skill in the bracket and fun to watch raffael and starch duke it out in the final. I usually don’t bother watching the matches in non-ffa modes once I get eliminated but this time they were so good I couldn’t turn away. My only complaint is that I was eliminated too early, but I’ll work on fixing that for next time :D

Bertolt_Brecht:

The tournament was great. I am happy to see friends participate in it. It was high competitive this one. Great matches between Raffael and Starch, both are great players. Personally even though I didn’t practise for it I enjoy it a lot but hey next time will try to aim a bit higher. Big thanks to frosty and Origin for the tournament and Notas for the stream.

Tamin0:

Well i was proud to see so many people was playing always fun with so a big Group i had not much but funny games. In my opinion it wasn’t good that people Show up at 6:15 p.m.


Stuff between the lines:

So, what’s still missing? Right! The plain common-sense thank-you-and-stfu-already! part: I like that tournament series even though I haven’t participated in months. But, they are regular, thrilling, competitive and bring live to this … let me quote

<Frosty> dedgame.

Thanks a lot to Frosty and his crew for doing that for us <3. Nevertheless, I personally want to thank notas (n0t4ri0r) for his hilarious VoD :). For the sake of completeness, I thank you, dear reader, a lot for reading my posts and I hope that they haven’t already become as boring and vintage-pornish as a sleepover at Trump’s. As always, you can submit constructive criticism and suggestions for future posts.

And, last but not least, I personally thank those who actually make this tournament possible: Our hard-working (well, not all of them) participants:

  • Alli
  • Bertolt_Brecht
  • FixxxerSA
  • Galaxy
  • hades
  • Honzik1
  • lagout
  • Lokio
  • Liugam
  • Master
  • raffael
  • Redon
  • Ren4rd
  • starch
  • Tamin0
  • ZCrone

… and we hope to see them again soon…

<Tamin0> But as i said i will stop playing competitive sauer for some month

OH FOOOOOOOOOK YO…


See you ’round and have a nice week!

Yours,

~ Tophy, commonly known as セバスティアン


~~ Links ~~

notas’ objective stream:
Click here

Wanna play in next tournament?
Click here
or, alternatively,
Discord

Nerd porn 4 free:
Click here

short creative break:

 

 

 

5 Comments

  1. Tophy

    As you, lovely reader, can easily see, people love the tournament and the stream. I agree 100% with the first one, but I have some critique at the stream: First of all, notas, my complaints only go against the game on simplicity that you’ve had commented on Sunday. I honestly disliked that you weren’t commenting in a neutral way. I mean, you can take a stance, for sure. But connecting to the server at which a specific map that you don’t like is played, and just saying that you “will see how much it sucks” since you couldn’t figure out how it got back into the pool, is, in my opinion, a very odd and awkward way of going into the thing. I would have been okay with it, but instead of just watching another game (and there were some other “better” games around, undoubtedly), you just went ahead with saying that simp is garbage. Also, some of your comments were pretty captious, in my opinion. Many of them could have been misunderstood easily by some guys in the audience (like me, for instance). So, to be brief, I still like your stream(s) and my critique is not meant to be offensive at all, but, at the very least, try to focus more on keeping your streams and comments neutral.

    Reply
    1. notas

      Tamin0 is a great player especially in team modes. I re watched the part of the video in question and I don’t feel that I was derogatory or dismissive towards him besides a single comment that could be interpreted badly. I’m sorry if that one comment offended anybody but in my defense, I have been doing this for 3-4 hours at a time for more than a year and I’m amazed it took me this long to accidentally piss someone off.

      My stream contains traces of opinion just like your tourney write up. Have you ever listened to Jeff van Gundy calling a basketball game? Probably not because Europe, but I’m not even as bad as him and he gets paid ridiculous money to do it full time in nationally televised games. I do strive to keep my biases from getting in the way of the game too much but I need SOMETHING to talk about during 3 hours of MG to rifle combos.

      Simp sucks. I trust my viewers are intelligent enough to form their own opinions if they don’t agree. But that was a great game and I’m glad I watched it

      Reply
  2. Frosty

    I think people having strong opinions is more interesting to listen to than not. I however disagree with his take on simplicity, but unfortunately I was not a part of the stream yet so we couldn’t have a dialogue about it :/

    Reply
  3. Gangler

    Great post. Im a big fan of value players by writing their names in short comments about them. Also a nice idea with the awards and +1 for using quotes.

    Not boring but very interesting article.

    Reply

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