Eshialand City, Eshialand
Welcome one, welcome all to the new Waterview Hotel in downtown Eshialand City for the milestone 10th edition of the Elephant Chess Cup!
24 prospective chess champions have signed up for the tournament, bringing 96 of their best players for the multiverse's premier chess tournament... and now, it's time to see who will be promoted to the title of the multiverse's chess champions!
Our format will be as follows (and as outlined in my host bid): the teams will be split into 4 groups of 6. The top 3 in each group will move on to the knockout stage, with first place going to the quarterfinals, and second and third going to the Round of 12.
Tiebreakers for the group stage will be as follows:
- Group position (only for determining knockout seeding)
- Points (2 for winning your match, 1 for drawing)
- Board points (1 for each player who wins, 0.5 for each player who draws)
- H2H record
- IC coinflip (OOC: I will scorinate a tiebreaker game)
- OOC coinflip
The group stage will be single round robin, with knockouts being double-legged with aggregate score determining the winner (if the teams tie 4-4, there will be a blitz playoff, and if that is tied, the higher seed advances.) All matches will be played in the 15+5 time control (15 minutes per player, with 5 seconds of bonus time for every move played), except blitz tiebreakers which will use 3+2 (3 minutes a side, 2 seconds bonus time per move). One match will be scorinated per cutoff in the group stage, but both legs of each knockout matchup will be on the same cutoff.
Although this tournament does not use ranks, in order to avoid an ECC VIII situation where most of the scary teams are concentrated in one or two groups, all participating former champions (The Kytler Peninsulae and TJUN-ia) and runners-up (Eshialand and South Newlandia) will be seeded into a Pot 1 of sorts, where no two of them can be in the same group. The rest of this tournament will be unseeded.
If you are one of the following 24 nations, you may begin to post rosters and roleplays now!
Groups
Group A
Valentine Z
The 14 Stars
Katzeburg
The Kytler Peninsulae
Farfadillis
Elejamie
Group B
Sky Reavers
The Kaisers Syndicates
Natkr
TJUN-ia
Vonum
Crpostran
Group C
Busoga Islands
Nightralia
Barkhastan
Eshialand
Tero al Disco
Schachland
Group D
New South Yukon
South Newlandia
Yesopalitha
Vaishnavaria
The Martian Independent Republic
Natanians and Nosts
AI policy: it has come to my attention that a clarification to the AI policy is in order. There are really only a couple use cases for AI on this forum in my view: one of them is image generation. Not all of us are good with graphic design, so using AI to generate images is fine, as long as you state that they were generated by AI. As for the text of your RP, translating an RP from your native language into English with DeepL is fine (although please include the original version in a spoiler tag!) and using AI to brainstorm ideas is also okay. As for AI grammar checking, I don't mind it as long as the text itself was written by you, the human, although bear in mind I really don't mind if your grammar isn't perfect and may be more likely to view an RP without perfect grammar as being "better" than one that was AI-aided. Of course, all uses of AI need to be stated explicitly, or your scorination rank will be reset to zero! Fully AI-generated text, beyond the scope that I've outlined, is also not allowed.
Schedule: (all IC times in EshST [Eshian Standard Time]. All OOC times are 19:00-21:00 EDT [23:00-1:00 the next day UTC])
Round | IC Time | OOC Date |
Matchday 1 (1v6, 2v5, 3v4) | Thursday, March 6th, 2031, 18:00 | Friday, October 11th |
Matchday 2 (6v4, 5v3, 1v2) | Friday, March 7th, 2031, 11:00 | Monday, October 14th |
Matchday 3 (2v6, 3v1, 4v5) | Friday, March 7th, 2031, 13:00 | Wednesday, October 16th |
Matchday 4 (6v5, 1v4, 2v3) | Friday, March 7th, 2031, 16:00 | Friday, October 18th |
Matchday 5 (3v6, 4v2, 5v1) | Friday, March 7th, 2031, 18:00 | Monday, October 21st |
Round of 12 | Saturday, March 8th, 2031, 11:00 and 13:00 | Wednesday, October 23rd |
Quarterfinals | Saturday, March 8th, 2031, 16:00 and 18:00 | Friday, October 25th |
Semifinals | Sunday, March 9th, 2031, 11:00 and 13:00 | Monday, October 28th |
Finals, 3PPO | Sunday, March 9th, 2031, 16:00 and 18:00 | Wednesday, October 30th |
In each matchup, the first listed team has black on boards 1 and 3, and white on boards 2 and 4.