I have a general rule that if I'm ever asked the same question several times in a short period, I go ahead and address the question on the blog. The way I figure it, if 3 or 4 people bothered to email me about it, there were probably several more that wondered it, but never bothered to articulate their curiosity.
So the question I've gotten several times over the weekend was in regards to the tournament we did on Saturday. Specifically, why wasn't there a MYACH tournament?
Well, there are actually several good answers to that question so I'm going to tackle them one at a time:
1) There aren't enough MYACH players
There are plenty of people out there that play MYACH, of course, but in any given tournament, odds are against us bringing a significant number of them. It would be nice if we could send out the Myachi helicopter and pick up all the great MYACH players from around the country and put them together in a no-hold-barred throw down of epic proportions.
But in reality, when we do a tournament we can only count on a small percentage of the Myachi players in the area to show up. In that group, odds are that only a few of them will really be accomplished MYACH players. The few that are would obviously dominate everyone else so if fewer than half of the competitors are solid MYACH players, less than half of them would stand any real chance of winning.
2) Everybody Wants to Play
In the lead up to last weekend's tournament, the question I was most often asked was "Will I stand a chance?" or, from the parents of an interested maniac, "Will he/she stand a chance?"
As it was, I could confidently answer "yes". Because we were focused on things like Big Air, Golf and Long Toss, you didn't have to be a absolute trick master in order to participate. If the focus of the tournament was MYACH I would have had to tell most of the younger (or newer or less trick-oriented) players that they really didn't have a chance to win.
3) Too Many Arguments
Alright, so the two reasons above are good, but the clever reader will be saying right now, "Okay, so you can't do a tournament that's just MYACH, but couldn't you add MYACH as one of the disciplines? Couldn't it be one more wing of the tournament like Big Air or Golf?"
That's true, of course. But there are still other problems with MYACH competitions. Any of you who regularly play will probably be able to attest to the fact that there seems to be a 3 argument minimum for most people when they play the game. Al will say that Bob pinched and Bob will deny it. Carol will say that David didn't go all the way around it on his 720. Ed will say that Felicia palmed it on her Dagger and Gina will say that Hank was practicing before the set. Meanwhile Ike will try to call a trick that is officially banned and Joe will call some trick he made up and then insist that nobody is "doing it right" and that they should all get lettered.
You can overcome this, of course. You just have to have a judge overseeing every move everyone calls, sets, defends or makes. That is very doable, but it takes as many judges to do one MYACH tournament as it would take to do four contests in other disciplines. This leads us to the next issue...
4) It Takes Too Long
A good game of one on one MYACH between two equally matched players lasts about 25-35 minutes. If both players are missing a lot of sets or hitting a lot of defenses, it can last twice that long. If you extrapolate out from there, you can imagine a MYACH tournament between, say, 24 players taking all afternoon.
That's not necessarily a bad thing, of course, but it's a big undertaking. We couldn't do a tournament like that at a place like Funky Monkey (the venue where we held the tournament this weekend) because places like that will only let us use their space for a couple of hours at a time. On top of that, many of the parents that were bringing our contestants out were at their limit after 3 hours of competition.
5) We Already Know Who's Going to Win
Consider any group of Myachi players you know. It could be your group of friends or a group of people you know in school or even just a random selection of Myachi Maniacs from the forum or our FB page. Now think about all those players and ask yourself which one would win in a game of MYACH.
Odds are that you already know who it would be, right? Perhaps there are two contenders that might win, but at the very least you know that most of the group will not stand a real chance at winning. So even if we had a blast doing that, the end would be an anti-climactic foregone conclusion.
---------------------
Now, all that being said, I should explain that I agree that a MYACH tournament would be fun, awesome and worth having. But to make that work, we would need to find a time and place where we could get at least a dozen really good MYACH players together. Unfortunately that is tougher than it sounds. The goal of the tournament we did this weekend was to bring together as many Myachi players as possible, but I'm willing to bet that several of the ones that showed might have elected to stay home if they knew that they were going to have to beat Mantis at MYACH
No comments:
Post a Comment