When we showed up on Friday evening to set-up for what is the last of our scheduled tournament dates at Bearded Lamb Brewing, I honestly didn't know if we would have enough participants to have a full-fledged 16-person tournament.  Some last minute recruiting yielded us a new batch of Brackets Baby! seedlings and the tournament proceeded forward with all the usual excitement.

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This tournament played probably the most true-to-form, of the four that we hosted at Bearded Lamb, with the favored seeds holding court, with the exception of the #5 and #8 Seeds being upset in the first round, and then the #6 Seed upset the #3 Seed in the second round.  There were several nail-biter games that came down to the final Bonus Card flip to decide a winner, but ultimately the #1 Seed prevailed this time around.

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Out of the four tournaments played, the winning Seed of each tournament was the #3 Seed in Tournament One, the #1 Seed in Tournament Two, the #4 Seed in Tournament Three and finally the #1 Seed again in Tournament Four.  I'm happy to see some variety there, but would have been happy to pay out a bit bigger gift cards to see some real surprise champions.  I might have to re-introduce the Cinderella story house rules to future tournaments (where the team that upsets a higher ranked Seed inherits 3 cards from that deck, improving their odds to win again)!  

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Overall, it was a TON of fun putting these tournaments together, meeting a bunch of new people at the brewery, and gaining some hugely instrumental feedback about this game that I have put a fair amount of time, effort and $$ into.  I think that the concept has been proven, and now want to pore some creative juices into another iteration or two with a very similar concept, but incorporating different sports (Brackets Baby! Golf MatchPlay Tournament or Football Playoffs anybody?!).  Stay tuned for more. 

 

In the meantime, I welcome thoughts and feedback - please engage on our Social Sites and let me know what you think.  A huge thank you to all that participated in the tournaments, and even bigger thank you to my friends and family that have helped set-up cameras and microphones (my good friend Mike G. and brother Eric), kept score (my son Gabe), acted as my video producer (my lovely wife Jen) and just all around support and cheerleading this game along.  Let's run it all back again soon!