#this is also probably more information than yall need ESPECIALLY since we aren't QUITE ready yet but i wanted to ramble about brackets

[mcytblrsexymen]

How the Sexyman Bracket Will Work

AKA, oh god, why did you people choose a 96-man seeded single-elimination bracket and what do we do about it?

So, as you all know, originally the plan was for a simple, 64-man bracket. However, we got a wild number of nominations, and after looking at the list ourselves, we didn't want to leave it off at 64 - there were some really interesting people just below the cutoff, and also this way we didn't have to heavily tiebreak, whereas with the 64-man tournament we would have needed to tiebreak for the bottom seed.

After some discussion, we determined that the field was too wide if we went all the way out to 128, and began discussing byes. It was determined we'd go out to 96. How a 96-man bracket works as is follows: the 64 lower-seed players are paired, and will face each other. Then, after the winners of those matches are determined, the top 32 players, who each have a bye, face the winners of the first round. After that, it is structured like a normal tournament. This means there will be two rounds of 64, and that the most popular sexymen will not compete in the first round. So keep an eye out!

This introduces some new advantages to how the bracket will work, as well as lets us pull in a few more of the weird and fun guys you all rallied behind, instead of just the big names! Plus, since this is not a power of 2 and therefore gives the highest seeds a bye, it means those little guys are guaranteed a somewhat closer matchup at the beginning - you don't have to worry your small streamer had to face Scar round one. We save that for round two.

Additionally, why are we doing seeded, as opposed to randomizing the matchups or choosing bespoke matchups? For one, we had easy seeds - the nomination rankings determined where we seeded each nominee. If we already had everyone ranked, may as well use it!

Additionally, we here believe that a seeded tournament leads to the most interesting sexyman matchups, as it is designed to make sure the most exciting matches, between the most evenly-matched players, will be last, as opposed to happening early and then allowing someone to cruise to an easy victory (or be robbed of their chances). It also prevents us from being able to attempt to make our personal favorite guys have an easier time of it, makes sure each side of the bracket is approximately evenly matched, and makes the underdog stories more spectacular when they happen, as those underdogs will have had to have competed in a real battle to win!

So there you have it: the reasoning for why we're using a slightly unusual tournament structure, and what to expect tomorrow when the actual bracket is released.

the TL;DR is: expect a bracket that looks like the below, but much prettier, because we have gotten some help making a more readable version of this!

[image ID: a 96-man bracket. /end ID]