I don't have any magic tips on accomplishing the amazing feat that is staying cool under pressure. I just managed to pull it off last Saturday (September 8) at the fighting game tournament I held at the WZZRD in Utrecht. I won the CvS2 tournament and finished running what I thought was a pretty successful tournament. Unfortnately there were downsides, but I'm still convinced most people had a good time.

The CvS2 tournament had 20 registered competitors that widdled down to 10 on the actual day of the competition itself. In the end I'm was happy about this. With fewer people there was less racing of the clock to finish before midnight. Of all competitors the only person I've played before was OKDHAB. He plays a very offensive style and I often have trouble just AA'ing and doing basic punishment. My first match is against him in a 5-man group. Our first match is a draw (double KO) which in itself was an omen. He wins our followup match quite handily. I then proceed to lose to a newcomer who I should have easily beaten were it not that I was still reeling from my loss. I Just barely scrape by a win against the other two players in my group and there is a three way tie for second place. One of those cyclical win situations that cause three way ties. Before I realised this I was reflecting on my losses and I realised it's because the pressure of running the tournament that I'm unable to remain calm and actually see what's going on. I reverted to my pattern-style playing which basically means I will do what I do regardless of what you do. I'ts the bane of my existence. When I saw the chance to get back into the tournament I realised what I had to do. Drop my very unexperienced A-Maki and revert to A-Vega/Haohmaru/Blanka. I proceed to beat the two other players quite handily in the tie breaker. Onto the semis where I believe my biggest advantage was playing Haohmaru which seemed to work out really well. Not to mention Blanka, but he's probably my strongest character. So, no big surprise there. In the finals I play against OKDHAB again for the 3rd time that tournament. I can't say exactly what caused it, but he seemed to have caught the jittery impatientness bug I had just mentally shed a few minutes before. He jumped a lot, tried to DP out of poke strings ending up getting hit by Haoh's far fierce. AA customs were landed left and right making it a pretty convincing win in the end.

I ended up not competing in 3S because of the large number of participants. It ran smoothly with the system I used. I made 6 groups of which only the winner would proceed to the 8-man single elimination bracket. All 6 second place finishers were put in a 6-man single match group. After all 15 matches of that group were finished the top 2 players were put in the last two spots of hte 8-man bracket. In the end I think it was a very fair system considering the IMO best players made it into the quarter-finals. I beleive I learned quite a bit this time and hope to be a better organizer for it.