Round 3

The favorites demonstrated why they were the favorites in Round 3, with just one lower-seeded player taking the win in the second round: #25 seed ryoo narrowly defeated #9 degran 9-8. And don’t call it an upset, because ryoo was 5-0 in limited SCL play and was probably underseeded as a result.

A similarly underseed pofke scored a definitive 9-1 win over old-timer monaters. brskaylor won 9-2 against paragon12321. #1 seed turnipboy took care of business 9-4 against frostie, and #3 seed sheph did the same against Max Edward Snax. On paper, the closest Round 3 match was #6 davidw against #11 amlabella, but the former won with the same 9-3 margin of last week’s matchup with dbdkmezz.

After hundreds of regular season matches and dozens more in this tournament, we’re down to just eight players fighting for the last two auto-promotions:

Of the top six seeds, four are still alive, and one of the two eliminated simply failed to play their match. Expect the remaining matches to be hard-fought and generally much closer. Everything which rises must converge.

The full Challenger Tournament bracket is available here.

Round 2

The biggest news in Round 2 was #34 pofke‘s narrow 9-7 upset of #2 seed bitbandingpig. You can at least partially slot this into the “Underseeded Players” category we mentioned in last week’s summary, however, as pofke joined the SCL in Week 7 and went 4-0, obscuring their likely skill level. pofke draws an interesting opponent in monaters, an experienced player who returned after a significant layoff to defeat basshead last week and badplayer this week by a razor-thin 9-8 margin. We never know what to expect when new, hungry players meet more seasoned (but perhaps less recently practiced) ones, so this’ll be a big match to watch in Round 3.

We nearly had a second upset of similar size, as sheph narrowly survived against watermeat 9-8 in a dramatic casted match, in what should probably serve as a warning to the latter’s Group E competitors in the parallel Summer Cup group stages.

#4 seed tarekmak failed to play their match with #29 seed paragon12321, who advances by default to take on #13 seed brskaylor after their defeat of zerodoom 9-3. Other than that, most of the favorites took care of business: turnipboy defeated belial 9-4, brskaylor defeated, degran defeated jinetic 9-4, and plastikqs took his set against HumanKirby 9-2.

We’re down to just 16 competitors now, and so far three of the seven players who received a bye have already been knocked out.

The full Challenger Tournament bracket is available here.

Round 1

The first round of the Challenger tournament is completed. At a glance, it seems as if eight of the 25 played matches in the first round resulted in upsets, but they mostly slot into distinct categories:

1. Narrow Upsets. Most of Challenger was jammed together, so any two competitors within a few ranks of one another probably have no meaningful difference. This describes such “upsets” as #33 belial defeating #32 rta, or #35 watermeat narrowly defeating #30 portalfreak.

2. Underseeded Players. The Swiss system run in Challenger allowed for entrants even late in the season. This meant a lot of good players, because they only played a few matches, were seeded lower than their skill level would dictate. This was certainly the case with #47 monaters, who had over 2,000 games played (albeit with a long layoff) before joining the SCL in Week 7, who won 9-1 over #18 basshead. It’s also true of #57 skrewwl00se, who joined for Week 10 (and won easily) before defeating #8 magicdoer1. It’s doubly rough for magicdoer, who was the highest seed not to receive a bye, and then was randomly paired with a clearly underseeded opponent.

3. Genuine Upsets. The only unqualified upset is #51 sikeeatric narrowly defeating pash1k (#14) despite the fact that both played the entire season, resulting in a 4-12 points disparity.

Round 2 has already started. We’re down to 32, and the top seven seeds—all of whom received byes—get to start playing.

The full Challenger Tournament bracket is available here.