CrossPoint Guitar Hero Tournament

Yes, we are putting together a CrossPoint Guitar Tournament.  It's primarily for fun, and all proceeds will go to CrossPoint.  Since we're inviting everyone at all levels to play, we've gotten the question a few times on how we'll play out the tournament.  So, though I put this information on the Facebook Guitar Hero Tournament Page, I wanted to let everyone who doesn't have a Facebook account know how we planned on playing out the Guitar Duels. 

We did a lot of thinking about this. What we wanted to do was to make sure that everyone could come and have fun, regardless of what level they were at. But, without a ton of time, and a qualifying round, how do you break people up into brackets? This is not something that’s easy to do, especially with our time limitations, and not knowing how many people we’ll have, so we settled on what we thought would be the most fair. Plus, we didn’t want to make it too complicated. Not sure how well we succeeded on that front.

Basically, we’ll start with two brackets: Beginner and Advanced. If you play on Easy or Medium, you’ll start out in Beginner. If you play on Hard or Expert, you’ll start out in Advanced. We started out this way to make it a little quicker, but to also give people more chances to play. This way, everyone gets to play in at least two guitar duels, even if they lose. [Note: If you tend to 5-star just about every song on Medium, you’ll probably want to start in the Advanced bracket.]

We’ll randomly draw names in each bracket to find out who will play each other in a Guitar Duel. Who wins this round will determine which bracket each person goes to in the next round. Everyone in the Beginner bracket will play their first round on Easy; the winners of the Beginner bracket will advance to the Medium bracket. Everyone else will advance to the Easy bracket. This way, everyone that loses in the first round gets to play again against someone else who lost in the first round. Both of these brackets will advance the normal way, until there is an overall winner in each.

The same thing will happen for the Advanced bracket. All of the duels in the first round will be played on Hard. Winners advance to the Expert bracket, while everyone else advances to the Hard bracket. Duels will be played out in the same way until there is an overall winner.

We’re hoping that this gives everyone a chance to play, and still be fair in who gets to play who.

What’s to stop people from being dishonest about what level they’re in, or sandbagging on the first round so they get to play easier on the second? Well, nothing. We hope that, this being a CrossPoint event, everyone will be honest, and come to have fun and do their best.

For early registration, feel free to click on the picture below, and print it out.  Give it to me, or Joe with your registration fee.

Thanks, and hope everyone comes to play (or at least watch)! I'm hoping we'll have time at the end for some free-form play and Guitar Duels.  Maybe we'll even break out the instruments and get another band going.

Let me know if you have any questions.