After the preliminary rounds, came the real deal.
The actual 5 vs 5 Interstellar Circuits Tournament, featuring the 64 qualified teams in a brutal single-elimination bracket.
There were no second chances here, no safety nets. Lose once— and you were out, making upsets a big possibility in this tournament.
However, although in principle all participating teams had an equal chance to reach the finals, in practice it was anything but.
With the matchups being decided through a top-seeding system, a tradition in the Interstellar Circuits designed to reward those who excelled in the preliminary round, the tournament heavily favored the best performing teams to advance furthest in the tournament, protecting them from early upset knockouts.
Simply put, the higher you scored in the preliminaries, the better your seed — and the weaker your first-round opponent.
The first seed would face the sixty-fourth, the second would face the sixty-third, and so on.
