For about a decade from the late 1990s, competitive gaming was organised as a circuit. Not a broadcast, not a platform ladder — a calendar of physical events in different countries, feeding qualified players into a grand final, with published rules and prize money announced in advance.
The CPL World Tour was that model at its most ambitious: the Cyberathlete Professional League taking its championship structure out of Dallas and running it as an international season with stops on several continents.
This site is about that circuit and the competitive culture it belonged to, and about the thing the circuit was made of: brackets, seeding, formats, schedules, and the trade-offs an organiser makes before a single match is played. Those mechanics have not aged. A 2005 world final and a present-day open qualifier are solving the same arithmetic.
The circuit: how a world tour was built
Regional qualifiers, international stops, a points ladder and a grand final — and the freight, visa and venue problems that decide whether any of it happens.
BYOC: the hall, the network, the pipeline
Thousands of players, their own towers and CRTs, a temporary LAN built in a day, and an on-ramp to professional play that nothing has replaced.
Tournament formats and what each one costs
Single elimination, double elimination, Swiss, round robin and GSL groups, compared on match count, fairness, dead rubbers and schedulability.
Bracket calculator
Field size in; matches, rounds and byes out, for eight structures including groups feeding a playoff. Derived arithmetic, no sign-up.
Running a tournament
Seeding, bracket placement, station count and the two independent floors that decide when your final can start. With a schedule estimator.
The games of the circuit era
Why arena shooters, tactical shooters and real-time strategy carried competitive play, and what each demanded of the venue.
What replaced the circuits
Online qualifying, live streaming and publisher-run leagues — what each solved, and what the circuit model had that none of them kept.
What this site is interested in
Structure, mostly. There is no shortage of writing that tells you a particular final was thrilling. There is very little that will tell you why the format made a dead rubber impossible, why the byes went where they went, or why an event with plenty of machines still finished two hours late.
The other bias is against invented precision. Documentation of pre-broadcast competitive gaming is genuinely poor: much of it lived on forums and event pages that are gone, and specific figures get copied between fan sites until they harden into fact. Where a number cannot be stood behind, this site writes around it. Where the answer is arithmetic — matches, rounds, byes — it is derived in the open so you can check it rather than trust it.