Winter Cup 2019 Group Stage Update

Going into the tournament, Group 1 looked to have a clear favorite in turnout8 while the other three players would battle for the second place spot. So far, that’s not actually how the group seems to be playing out. Both Kotte and iggythegrifter beat QuickLime (our emergency substitute for Sergioc89, who unfortunately had to drop due to health concerns) fairly convincingly, but in turnout’s first match of the group stage they took a resounding loss. This turns the entire group on its head, leaving first place up for grabs! Our featured match from this group will be Kotte vs. iggythegrifter, which seems like it might decide who gets out of groups, or even who gets top seed, depending on turnout8’s future performance.

What to say about Group 2? Oh right, it has KrazyCaley in it. As with Group 1 there was a clear favorite going in, but unlike Group 2 this truly is a scramble for second place. Caley hasn’t quite locked in his expected 3-0 yet, but ml276 has locked himself out of the bracket stage, despite a close, exciting matchup against the king of SpyParty himself. Catnip, on the other hand, has strong odds to emerge from the group with victories over both ml276 and orac. Orac can still technically supplant her, but it’ll require that he defeat both ml726 and KrazyCaley, the prohibitive favorite for the tournament.

This is a fun group. Cartwright made waves by nearly winning an extremely competitive set with Pwndnoob, our group favorite. He then went on to lock himself in a bracket spot by beating both mintyrug and bluspacecrab. bluspacecrab is locked out of the top 2, having an 0-2 record so far with two competitors owning a 2-X record, but mintyrug has a chance to tiebreak over Pwndnoob if she can force a 3 way tie by beating both bluspacecrab and Pwndnoob with a collective game score of at least 16 wins.

Group 4 is an exciting one, but not much has been played yet. Excepting our Featured Match of the group, OpiWrites vs. Ryooo, only one other match has been played so far, with OpiWrites taking down belial 10-2. Unfortunately, belial may be dropping due to an extended sickness, but this group should still be thrilling.

Another group with not many matches played. In fact, only one has been played, and as such it’s automatically become our featured match! So, nothing to divulge here, yet.

Not much here yet either. DavidW and JYATY came into this group looking to be the top two, and they are our featured match for the group, with the winner likely to take top seed. Other than that, Calvin Schoolidge is 1-1 and has a chance to upset JYATY to take 2nd seed, or force a three-way tie, depending on the result of the featured match. Gabrio lost 1-11 to Calvin Schoolidge, and will have to bring out the big guns and upset both JYATY and DavidW to move forward.

Group 7 seemed tough to puzzle out at first, but the picture has become clearer: Lazybear, the favorite, has been taking matches left and right. In the featured match versus degran, he looks to go 3-0 to secure the group’s top seed. degran and Max Edward Snax are each looking to claw their way into the top 2, while dbdkmezz is going to need a few things to go very right to make it into bracket stage. If either degran or Max can pick up two match wins, dbdkmezz will be locked out of the bracket stage.

Group 8 found itself early on with two favorites: our resident site admin and the researcher of Diamond, WarningTrack, and abearRAWR. So far, this has been borne out with abearRAWR taking 10-2 victories over both hunu and howiie. WarningTrack took our only shutout victory in the tournament so far over howiie with an astounding 12-0 series. Hunu also managed to beat howiie 8-4, knocking him out of contention. In our featured match, WarningTrack and abearRAWR will battle it out for what will likely be the difference between first and second seed in Group 8.