Round 5: Top Table Update
The Yu-Gi-Oh! Championship Series is played as a Swiss-format competition. That means players can compete in all the Swiss Rounds regardless of their record. At the end of those Rounds the Top 32 players continue on to compete in single elimination playoffs, and with 568 Duelists registered this weekend, we’re playing 10 Swiss Rounds total before the cut.
In any Swiss-format tournament, players with similar records are always paired together: if you won your first Round, you’ll play Round 2 against another Duelist that won Round 1 like you did. Win Round 1 and Round 2 and you’ll play Round 3 against a Duelist who’s also 2-0. And so on and so on, until the Swiss Rounds are over.
As you win more and more Matches the tournament software sorts players with the best records closer and closer to Table 1: the better you’re doing, the lower your Table Number. That means once several Rounds of competition have passed and the most successful players are all clumped together, we can look at the top tables to see which decks are the most played there, and get a quick idea of which strategies are doing the best. Here in Round 5 is a good time to do that – the Top 10 Tables are all still undefeated, while player records start to immediately decline.
So here’s what’s being played at the Top 10 Tables, here in Round 5!
Table 1:
James Kim with True Draco Zoodiacs
Versus
Shadhursen Puvanendra with True Draco Zoodiacs
Table 2:
Alexander Buell with True Draco Zoodiacs
Versus
Ricky Lak-Hang Lee with True Draco Zoodiacs
Table 3:
Jordan Zembrowski with Pure Zoodiacs
Versus
Deep Patel with Pure Zoodiacs
Table 4:
Thomas Mak with Pure Zoodiacs
Versus
Eric Pacheco with True Draco Zoodiacs
Table 5:
Jeffrey Leung with Pure Zoodiacs
Versus
Emmad Fajem with Kaiju Zoodiacs
Table 6:
Mason Mattila with True Draco Zoodiacs
Versus
Benjamin Slutsky with Pure Zoodiacs
Table 7:
Patrick James with Pure Zoodiacs
Versus
Gabriel Marini with Pure Zoodiacs
Table 8:
Michael Albanese with True Draco Zoodiacs
Versus
Tom Braudo with Demise True Dracos
Table 9:
John Wilkin with Kaiju Zoodiacs
Versus
Arnold Nadaban Zanabria with Pure Zoodiacs
Table 10:
Griffin Meier with True Draco Zoodiacs
Versus
Jeremy Thimbeau with Pure Zoodiacs
For those of you keeping track, that’s 9 Pure Zoodiacs; 8 True Draco Zoodiacs; 2 Kaiju Zoodiacs; and 1 Duelist running a dedicated True Draco Deck. The field is certainly not determined yet and there’s still plenty of room to see some shifts in the ranks, but for now Pure Zoo and True Draco Zoo are going head-to-head, collectively dominating the top tables.
Will that continue? Will we see some Yang Zing Dinosaurs or rogue strategies in Day 2? We’ll check back in Round 7 with another Top Table Update to get a better idea of how YCS Toronto is shaping up.