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Thanks to BLueSS, courtesy of the PNWBemani community, we were able to learn of the results of the Nov. 14 regional qualifier for the DDR National Tournament along with the member's personal thoughts on how the tournament functioned.

Quoted from BLueSS at PNWBemani: "... Coming into the tournament, nobody from the Seattle area had high expectations due to the horrible news we had heard about the previous tournaments. Overall, though, most of us were fairly impressed with how well things actually worked out, despite everything that could have gone wrong.

There were 34~ entrants with the majority of players (including the top ones) being from our PNWBemani forum here. The top picks going into the tournament were our top players, several of whom were practicing for a couple weeks for the tournament. They were Keby (Kevin), Amber, and Suko, all of which placed in the top 4, with the exclusion of Andy Burns, who was a surprise entrant who did very well!

As said earlier, the staff knew nothing about DDR. This led to some humorous lines, such as "Keep your stuff off the DDR," and an announcer who was funny, but knew nothing about the game. This also led to some bad parts, such as the staff 1) Not knowing you can't play a tournament song on Extra Stage, 2) Accidentally choosing the wrong song half of the time, 3) Not knowing why players were complaining about the pads.

Seattle Gamework's pads have never been in tournament condition, although to their credit, the pads were repaired several times the day of the tournament and were almost to the level of Bill's (Masterman Vending) machines during tournaments ran at his venues.

The tournament staff were temporary hires from Craigslist, with the exception of the Konami rep who was intent on having everything done her way. To their credit, we were very thankful that they acknowledged that the pads needed repaired several times, however, they only started caring after Kevbo (Kevin Boddy, who was here from out of town) talked to them. Since he was the winner from one of the other Regional DDR Tournaments, apparently, he had enough credibility for this lady to listen to him. Thankfully he was there, because they let him even test the pads after the repairs to make sure they were ok ... but if he wasn't there I have a feeling our tournament wouldn't have been so good.

For a tournament that started at 1PM, they were still at the final 8 at 6PM. I had to leave at that point, so I don't know how the rest of the tournament went. It was long because the staff didn't know what they were doing for two of the parts and took a 1 hour break to eat, a 30 minute break to figure out who moved on/bracketing ... and the bracketing wasn't seeded properly, so several players went over to get that fixed.

All the songs were chosen from the official song lists provided, with the tournament staff spinning a prize wheel to choose which song got chosen. The wheel was not very well calibrated as there was about 40 minutes of The Least 100 Seconds played during the tournament and she had to rewrite the songs on the wheel several times to get them evenly distributed.

The winners/placement was:
1) Amber
2) Kevin (Keby)
3) Andy Burns
4) Suko

It was a fun time, as the majority of our Seattle DDR Community was there. This will probably be the biggest tournament we will have in our area, as it also had some entrants from outside the community. It was a good time and, thankfully, didn't turn out as bad as we were expecting. The Seattle Gameworks staff and manager were very nice and helpful at making sure the tournament ran ok, the tournament staff were ok once Kevbo showed them the pads sucked and almost everyone had a good time ..."

BLueSS and the members of PNWBemani have additional comments and information as well as photos of the event on the community site if you are interested. Congratulations go out to the winners as we look forward to the Dec. 5 finals to be held in Las Vegas.