I have to say I’m extremely disappointed at how the most recent Street Fighter tournament was run on Saturday. I’ve attended many tournaments but only a few for Street Fighter but enough to get a general idea of how SF4 tournaments should be run. With the fact that I know many of the DIZeLAN staff members and have for a while now and have gone there to play Unreal Tournament and such, I really thought that while their place was small that this would be a good environment for the tournament… I was a bit wrong it seems.

First of all let me say that this tournament was set to start at 10pm. Knowing that most SF4 tournaments run for a good 4 hours at least I was a bit bummed to know that it was starting so late. I was under the impression that there were about 18 teams there due to that being the amount of people I saw on the list for sign ups. When I got to DIZeLAN (about 8pm) I was told that there was about 30 teams now and that there was only 4 tv’s to compete on. Also, the game was supposed to be double elimination style meaning that would almost double the amount of time to complete the tournament.

Well… 10pm comes and 28 teams show up and each person has to pay $10. $30 per team seems like a bit much, but that just means the pot should be set for a good $800. They have about 90-100 people at the frag center so the rule is that if your team isn’t playing that you have to wait outside in the front or the back.

As time goes on people start to get hot and tired… the lights keep going out due to the circut breaker tripping… at least the tv’s weren’t going out. There was incidents such as people’s wireless controllers connecting to xbox’s and mysteriously disconnecting leaving the game paused for a good 5-10 minutes while they have to locate the controller. Rules should have been set that all wireless controllers must have the batteries removed when not in use, but this wasn’t enforced to my knowledge.

Late into the night a team’s name is called out and the team doesn’t show up supposedly. This, according to the rules, means the team forfeits their match. One of the team members finds out that they were disqualified and goes in to talk to the DIZeLAN worker about the issue. He says “two of us were inside and one of us was outside the whole time… we never heard you call our name” and then goes around asking everyone if they heard their team name called. Apparently they tried to work out the issue and got their money back when the worker called the team member a bitch and a verbal fight started to break out almost turning into a physical one. AJ Papa caught some of this on tape…

The fact that this tournament started at 10pm, there’s so many people, it’s hot, it’s unorganized, people get irritable. I’m VERY disappointed to see that a DIZeLAN member participated in this drama and would not have expected for the tournament to be run like this. I feel like if the tournament had started at 2pm a lot of these issues wouldn’t have happened.

Moving on… the tournament didn’t end until 5am… and when it did end the winners (Mike Watson’s team YJDK) found out they only got about $300. Now… out of over $800 you would think that the winners would get roughly $500 or so because it is common in street fighter tournaments to go 60%, 30%, 10%. Where did the rest of the money go? Turns out DIZeLAN kept a whopping 40% of the total money earned from the tournament. The fact that DIZeLAN kept 40% is only part of the problem… the major problem is that they never told anyone they were going to be doing this. Most of the SF4 events I’ve attended charge a “venue fee” of $2-$5 then the entry fee money goes to the pot which is split accordingly. Had DIZeLAN at least announced the fact that they would be doing this up front people may have been ok with it, and the ones who weren’t wouldn’t have just skipped on attending. The 3rd place team got only about $16 per player… when you break it down they competed for 7 hours to get $6 profit… that’s horrible.

Basically what needs to happen is either DIZeLAN needs to skip on holding SF4 tournies all together or they need to fix all of the mistakes they’ve made by having an earlier start time, more copies of SF4 to run more games at once, post brackets in a location accessible to everyone and ensure that players know at least one match ahead of time as to when they’re up to play instead of when the match is supposed to start, and most importantly they need to work out the money situation. Realistically I think DIZeLAN shouldn’t have taken any more than 20% of the total earnings because it’s not like they had to rent the location out or this was a special event… we’re talking about a lan center that has its tv’s on 24/7 so it’s not like they had to cover extra electricity use or anything. Also don’t blame the people who attend the event for not having enough copies of the game. I heard one person say “we asked people who called in to bring copies of the game.” If you’re running the event it’s YOUR responsibility to supply the copies of the game, don’t blame the participants for not bringing their copy of SF4 for tons of random ppl to use. Hell, if they had to they should have went to Blockbuster and rented a few extra copies or something…. that’s just my opinion though.

Basically I’m a bit upset (if you can’t tell) at how poorly this went down. I hope that this does not discourage people from wanting to participate in more SF events and hopefully we can see something a bit more organized next time

One bit of advice to DIZeLAN… I highly recommend you take 20% of that 40% you kept on Saturday and give it to the top 3 teams, they earned it!