Hi everyone,

I’m Andy from BarCraft Vienna (technical support) and also organizer of our BCON Clash Vienna Qualifier.

As the tournament went down on Saturdays 4th May, and this being my first time organizing a tournament, I want to give you a small impression on how it went.

First thing’s first, some general data:

• 26 People Signed up
• 22 People Checked in (means actually played)
• 2 disconnects (of which one was myself)
• 1 Admin / 1 Caster / 1 person handling stream chat
• ~16 games casted (+/-2, nor exactly sure)

Let me also point out how the internal organization structure for that Qualifier was:
We were 3 people (primary) working on that project.

• Tom, doing promotion and giving general advices, meaning he played top dog ^^ (probably gonna regret that but sry, had to write that )
• Flo, being our Newsletter/Website/Graphics/”I already run on full throttle but don’t you dare do this graphic yourself” guy
• and me, covering the main part of the organization and crazy enough to do single-Amin on a tournament with a 32 players grid + cast

Now, how did the organizing thing work:
We had a deadline for mid May to do our Qualifier (given from BCON) and our final decision on joining the Cup went down April 10th. Needless to say time was short for organizing the whole thing. The first timetable I worked out actually contained 2 separated Qualifiers on 4th and 11th of May with the two champions of each weekend then competing in a Bo5 separately. But because none of us had any experience with organizing a tournament I decided to change it into 4th May only. I can tell you now that I wouldn’t have survived 3 Weekends of tournament-administration/-organization in a row (barely did anyway ).

The other big thing, that I actually was afraid of the most (as I totally suck in this part) was the promoting stuff.
At this point I have to give a big !!! THX !!! to Tom, Flo and Arne(Barcraft Aachen) for their help on writing, posting, handling Facebook events, setting up our Website and creating the actual Qualifier Page on inCup.eu
So yea, we first announced on Saturday 27th April, directly on the Barcraft event, which, looking back now, I think was a good decision. Even though we hadn’t had access to inCup.eu back then (for creating the Page). We got access 2 days later, but always could have moved to binarybeast, so that wasn’t too much of a concern.

What concerned me most was that our posts became more and more delayed, even though we tried hard to keep up. Especially the promotion of our stream came way too late (and I’m not blaming a specific person here because we all forgot about it)

By the way, our caster ([AFIN] Machete) is a newcomer concerning casts, but still did a good job. So if anyone still needs a German caster I think he would be happy to take the chance

At the end coming to the tournament itself starting 17:30 with check-in and 18:00 with 1st round:
I have to do a apology here because I had set the Check-in time on the inCup page to 18:00 in stead of 17:30 and at least one player missed the time frame therefore. This was a real nasty thing as in the Admin section of inCup.eu the label of that edit-box says “Starting time” not “Check in time”. Btw, all other Barcrafts doing their qualifier in inCup had made the exact same mistake (all fixed now as I immediately spread the word as soon as I found out, which sadly was one day later on answering a question about that).

Back to the tournament itself, everything went very well in the beginning, some problems occurred but nothing unexpected or not fixable. And then my “luckiest moment of the year” happened. Just after having dealt with the last problem and everybody was playing … disconnect O_o To make things worse it was not the normal kind of dc (simply waiting for the reconnect). No, it had to be a complete W-Lan system crash due to a lightning stroke (surprisingly my PC didn’t even blink on that ) It took me about 5 minutes to fix this. Nothing happened in the meantime (as they all played their games), right when I came back online the next incident occurred (some player had a disconnect). Couldn’t hit a better time to have a dc ^^ (except not having one of course).

Though it sounds like a lot of work doing administration of a 5 hours tournament, you can’t imagine how much it really is until you’ve done it yourself.
For example: I never thought it would be possible for one person to actually make use of 4 PC-screens at once … our Qualifier proved me wrong on that^^
You cant imagine that either? well, take a look:

how to use 4 screens on full capacity … do single-Admin on a SC2 Cup

• left srreen : Skype for communication with caster and facebook for Bacraft internal communication
• main scrren : SC2 Chat group for communication with players
• right screen: inCup.eu Grid and Admin-page
• Laptop: Stream to be ready if caster needs new match/information and Teamspeak as I wanted to talk to my friends if I have time to (that didn’t worked out btw )

In addition Flo was handling the Stream chat (he originally wanted to help me with the Admin thing, but wasn’t at home in time).

Finally, the last round finished, we had our Champion ([YSG]RyF) and I was allowed to die due to debility .
So yea, that was how it went from my point of view, of course notes on what went wrong were done so we can do better next time … and one day we will rule the world

greatz
Andy