Announcing the PokéStats TEU-SHF Invitational

As we mentioned on Twitter yesterday, PokéStats intends to hold quarterly Invitational tournaments shortly after each new set release, with the goal of featuring the best-performing players from the preceding Standard format. Our first of these events, the TEU-CPA Invitational, has one day left in the qualification period and will take place on Saturday, November 21st (more details here). 

As tournaments will begin utilizing Vivid Voltage as a legal set very soon, we are officially announcing the start of our TEU-SHF Invitational qualification period as Saturday, November 14th. The first tournament to award points towards this Invitational will be the Chrollo's Tournaments Season 2 Kickoff Event, which you can register for on Limitless here

The date of the TEU-SHF Invitational is: March 28th, 2021. The qualification period ends March 24th. 

We are making some minor changes or clarifications regarding the qualification process in comparison to the TEU-CPA Invitational. These are designed to make the qualification requirements easier to understand and work towards, and to make access to the Invitational more fair for all players attempting to qualify. 
  1. Only tournaments hosted on the Limitless Online Tournament Platform will award points towards qualification for PokéStats Invitationals. As the online tournament scene continues to grow, it can be difficult to keep track of all available tournaments and ensure that all tournaments are run fairly by reputable staffers. The Limitless platform is an easy way to catalog available tournaments and standardize their operating procedures. We encourage any tournament organizers who do not currently utilize this platform to begin doing so (PokéStats will be migrating our own tournaments over to the Limitless platform in the near future). 
  2. Only Standard TEU-SHF format tournaments will award points towards qualification. The goal of our Invitationals is to highlight the top-performing players from a specific Standard format. Thus, Expanded, old-format, custom-format, or other tournaments will not award points towards Invitational qualification. While we understand that this may be a disappointment for players who currently enjoy the Expanded format or our own old format tournaments, we still believe this choice is necessary to make the Invitationals accessible to skilled newer players and help grow the community, as well as to make the qualification process easier to track and quantify. We want player skill in a particular format, not PTCGO card availability or years of experience in the game, to be the chief factor in who qualifies for our Invitationals. 
  3. 48 players will be the attendance number that determines whether we count an event towards Invitational qualification. Moving forward, PokéStats will not be analyzing data from online tournaments with fewer than 48 players. This is simply because there is a very large amount of data available from the current online tournament scene and we need to focus on the "biggest and best" for purposes of both metagame analysis and player points. This number is not arbitrary--PokéStats has treated COVID-era online events as similar to League Cups for purposes of data analysis, and 48 is the attendance size for League Cups that triggers CP allotment for Top 16 (not just Top 8) players. 
    1. Point allotments: As before, we will award points to the Top 16 players in online events (with 48 or more players) as follows:
      1. 1st place - 5 points
      2. 2nd place - 4 points
      3. Top 4 - 3 points
      4. Top 8 - 2 points
      5. Top 16 - 1 point
      6. In events with 200 or more players, Top 32 placements will earn 0.5 points. 
  4. Any player qualifying for a PokéStats Invitational must be in good standing in the competitive community with no recent history of cheating, unsportsmanlike conduct, or other infractions. While PokéStats will evaluate everyone fairly on a case-by-case basis, it is likely that if you are banned from another tournament circuit for these infractions, you will not be welcome in PokéStats Invitationals. PokéStats reserves the right to remove a qualified player from an Invitational based on these standards and replace them with the next-highest-ranking player.
  5. PokéStats strives for high-quality content creation and, with this in mind, will make an effort to provide a high-quality stream experience with skilled casters for each Invitational. (The stream details and talented casting lineup for our first Invitational will be announced on our Twitter soon.) We will also strive to provide cash prizing for top performers in each Invitational and will look to secure sponsors from within the community to help achieve this. Please remember that for the foreseeable future, all donations to our Patreon will go directly back into the community in the form of Invitational prize pool funding.  
Please stay tuned to this website and our Twitter for updates. Best of luck during the qualification process--we look forward to rewarding the community's highest-achieving online players in our Invitational circuit.