New stupid tournament idea - Basho!

WARNING - NO WORLD CHAMPIONSHIP CONTENT IN THIS POST

I mentioned before I started on the worlds previews that I had a new stupid tournament format idea. So with the previews all done, let's look at it. For better or worse, I've been watching a lot of sumo over the past couple of months. Probably directly relates to them having a tournament in the UK for the first time since Phil Taylor had one world title, but whatever. What I liked about it was three fold, ignoring the actual merits of the sport:

a) Matches are quick. They can literally be over in seconds. Perfect for the Tiktok/ADHD addled generation.

b) The entirety of the pro scene has one continually moving, fluid divisional system, where competitors can rise or fall very quickly and will do so after a very good or bad tournament.

c) As such, every match matters - not just for those that want to win the outright title, there's a heck of a lot of pressure on getting the eighth win to have a winning record for the tournament, and conversely avoiding the eighth loss. But even after you've hit either mark, it still matters, as the amount you go up and down the rankings is not static, someone with a 7-8 record will only have a small drop, but end up 3-12 and you'll plummet.

So I then thought this could actually be a pretty good kind of system for darts in an odd way. How I would configure the tournament is like this:

- It runs across a seven day period starting on a Monday and ending on a Sunday, in something similar to a Euro Tour venue, replacing one European Tour and two Pro Tour events in the calendar. Total prize money would be relatively the same - the events being replaced would amount to £425k in prize money, but let's bump it to half a million (with revenue from additional sessions of live play open to the public, that does not seem absurd). Would probably look to hold around four of these per season, and each day's play has two sessions.

- The list of tour card holders is broken up into three roughly equal divisions - the top 40 who will play on the stage, then the next 40 and last 48 in lower divisions, who will play backstage on a pair of streamed boards. Whoever wants to enter plays, if there are fewer than 40 who enter in the bottom division, then Challenge Tour players complete the field just like in a Pro Tour. The bottom division stream on the afternoon session, the middle division on the evening session. If the stage schedule is running ahead of schedule then additional matches can be pulled from the stream room to fill out the time.

- Matches are a potentially very short format - first to gain a two leg lead wins the match, sudden death if 5-5. In other words, very similar to a tiebreaker deciding set at the worlds, except that if someone goes 2-0 up the match is over. To avoid the situation where it is the same player who is trying to hold to stay in the match all the time, rather than alternating legs, someone will have the darts in leg 1, then the other player will have it for the next TWO legs, and they swap throw every two legs after that.

- Opponents are determined for the following day after the previous day's matches are finished - there is no fixed match list. Who a player will get is typically based on trying to give an even structure of players ahead and behind them in the previous rankings in the first few days, before trying to match up those with more even records and clashes between the highest ranked players in later days. This has two purposes - it ensures that players will normally play someone in the same kind of tournament situation as them to increase the importance of each match, and loading the biggest match ups towards the end of the tournament helps to increase the excitement and hype around the business end. Should a player or players decide to not enter a given tournament, or withdraw midway through for whatever reason, then they are not outright replaced like for like - instead, each day will see players at the top end of the division above get a call up, the result counting in each player's respective division, the bonus for the player moving up being that they're playing for bigger prizes on the day.

- Whoever has the best record in each division wins. If two or more players are tied with the best record, then a playoff match(es) will take place to determine the winner. Following the tournament, players will move up or down the rankings, and up or down divisions, based on their records. Additionally, to take into account the tour card system, players who lose their tour card but don't regain it will be removed from the rankings, and everyone below them slides up a place.

In terms of prize money, this is how I would break it down for top/middle/bottom divisions:

Outright division winner: £50k/£30k/£20k

Individual match win: £1k/£600/£400

Tournament winning record: £60k/£36k/£24k split evenly between the respective players. Should the bottom division run with more than 40 players then the £24k will be reduced to account for more match win prizes needing to be paid.

Sounds complicated? It really isn't, but I'll do a walkthrough of how a typical tournament would operate in a separate post. That said, I hope there's enough explanation there to demonstrate how this would generate a lot of evenly matched content, and give everyone across the 128 a fair chance of having a solid week. Just getting to 4-3 in the bottom division would get you more than two and a half grand, which for a lower tier player isn't bad given that, in the tournaments this would replace, you're probably not qualifying for the Euro Tour and you'd probably need to beat a seed twice in the Pro Tours to do that.