Unveiling the field for the World Blitz Scrabble Championship
All right, let's do this!
Enough codifying tournament rules. Enough putting out announcements on social media. Enough planning behind the scenes. It's time to leave all the tedious prep work behind - it's time to play some Scrabble! I don't know about you, but I'm raring to go.
Three weeks ago, we first announced the World Blitz Scrabble Championship to the public. Now, 80 signups and a bunch of directorial legwork later, we're ready to go! It's a larger field than I was expecting, 80 players - we were under 50 for a while there, but a late surge in registrations toward the end of the 3-week period ended up bringing us to full capacity. This will be a good-sized field - 80 players sort themselves nicely into 8 groups of 10, which will make for a clean round-robin format.
Thanks to everyone who signed up, and thanks as well to everyone who helped behind the scenes with getting this event organized. Y'all know who y'all are. Now it's time to get started! I hope you're all looking forward to this event as much as I am.
Here's what happens next. I've got the field organized by numbered seeds - for the most part, these are based on people's WESPA ratings, though I made some adjustments for some players who are currently unrated by WESPA but have established ratings elsewhere. The top 8 players in the field are No. 1 seeds, the next 8 are No. 2's, and so on, down to 10. From here, the next step is to select groups! We'll establish 10 groups, lettered A through H, and hold a random drawing to put one player of each seed in each group. This will ensure that all the groups are (roughly) equally competitive.
Without further ado, here is your roster of 80 players:
NO. 1 SEEDS
Andrew Fisher, Austin Shin, Chris May, Conrad Bassett-Bouchard, David Eldar, Jesse Day, Paul Gallen, Will Anderson
NO. 2 SEEDS
Ben Schoenbrun, Christopher Grubb, Dave Wiegand, Edward Okulicz, Evans Clinchy, Geoff Thevenot, Piotr Andronowski, Weibin Toh
NO. 3 SEEDS
Brian Bowman, Doug Brockmeier, Enoch Nwali, Hubert Wee, Jakob Teitelbaum, Josh Sokol, Kevin Fraley, Zachary Dang
NO. 4 SEEDS
Amit Chakrabarti, Aaron Bader, Anand Bharadwaj, Jackson Smylie, Matthew O'Connor, Peter Armstrong, Ricky Purnomo, Ryan Sutton
NO. 5 SEEDS
Cedric Lewis, Cesar Del Solar, Irfan Siddiqui, James Curley, Janul de Silva, Lukeman Owolabi, Ryan Fischer, Shan Abbasi
NO. 6 SEEDS
Alex Tan, BJ Premore, Harry Wiggins, Leon Tan, Martin DeMello, Mina Le, Natthanon Limthongkam, Victor Tung
NO. 7 SEEDS
Aabid Ismail, Amalan Iyengar, Andrew Goldberg, Hriday Samtani, Indunil Amarasinghe, Joe McGinley, Mark Francillon, Sumeet Sachdev
NO. 8 SEEDS
Adrian Bailey, Arindam Basu, Cornelia Guest, Dipankar Chatterjee, Jack Moran, Priya Fernando, Rajiv Antao, Savio Rebello
NO. 9 SEEDS
Arvind Iyengar, Daniel Dugovic, Elbert Ang, Lalu Bashel, Lloyd Pearse, Mabinda Isaac Jonathan, Moses Uzum, Rob Varsalone
NO. 10 SEEDS
Aiman Zufayri, Chee Meng Lee, Dorothy Okatch, Idorenyin Anthony, Kavindu Malawaraarachchi, Lateef Oyawole, Roland Oppey, Thabo Lokwae
As for announcing the groups, we'll be doing that tonight in a live broadcast! We did this for the Virtual World Cup last year and people enjoyed it, so we're going to reprise it for BlitzChamps as well. Tune in to Will Anderson's Twitch stream (twitch.tv/wanderer15) tonight at 9 p.m. Eastern U.S. time, 6 p.m. Pacific, and we'll be drawing names at random to fill out the tournament groups. Tune in and find out who you're playing in real time!
After the selection show, we'll be setting up a schedule for the first week's matches and notifying all the players. If you're one of the 80 players listed above, you can expect an email either late tonight or early tomorrow informing you of your first scheduled match.
Thanks again to everyone who helped make this tournament possible! I hope everyone enjoys tonight's selection show, and good luck to all in the tournament.