Day 3 at Asia Plus Championship

Day 3 is finally over! Even though I only had 4 hours of sleep yesterday, I somehow made it through today! Even still managed to head out to walk around night markets again and visit the other countries' rooms. Im even typing my blog post in the Thai representatives' room as I speak. Click on!

Here are our representatives from each country as well as the shops that they are representing!

And a big turnout again today! About 200 players joined in the top shop today due to the large number of shops in Taiwan.

Format to select the top 8 was pretty interesting. Basically they first held a single elimination to reduce the number of players to about 100 players. After that, each of the 100 players were issued 2 star chips and the battle was a rush to get the first 6 players to have 30 star chips. This was done by 1 game battles between the players who basically gamble for star chips and try to increase their amount of chips.

Game format was really fast paced and exciting. Basically I was shouting myself hoarse for about 2 hours finding opponents for players with lots of shouting of stuff like "4 chips, who wants to fight for 4 chips!" As time continued, things got pretty exciting with people having to gamble 18 chips just to get the remainder 12 chips or nobody would play with them. Pretty soon, the top 6 players were settled. Then accompanied by 2 seeded players, the top 8 players played single elimination to decide first place to represent Taiwan. By the time top 8 was completed and the rep was decided, it was only 2+pm so it was really fast paced.

My opinion is this game format is really exciting, but pretty unfair since it encourages fast decks and control decks are at a disadvantage. Also, the games are 1 game decision matches, so there is no side decking. This is pretty different from the typical YuGiOh game. Furthermore, they would have to play the same deck in single elimination during the top 8 as well, so deck choices get restricted.

And the top 4 players are decided!

Here are the 6 players going against each other. Similar to the team play format, the 6 players are separated into 2 groups and play round robin. The winning team of each group then goes on to the finals while the 2nd place team will then go on to fight for 3rd or 4th.

The nice goodies for the players!

Malaysia and Philippines fighting it out for 1st and 2nd place

Hong Kong and Thailand fighting it out for 3rd and 4th

And the results are out!
1st - Malaysia
2nd - Philippines
3rd - Hong Kong
4th - Thailand

Photo of me with an old friend Jimmy, as well as one of the cuter girls manning (or woman-ing) the side events. Jimmy just jumped at the chance to get closer to her by promising to send her the photo, hence why she is in the photo, lol!

Photo with the Philippines team, who are also readers of our blog!
(Apparently quite a few Philippines read our blog, since even the distributor knew who I was straight away once the Philippines team introduced me. Thanks for all the support!)

And thats the end of the tournament! Really ended much earlier with the entire event ending at about 5.30pm. Packing up was quick and we headed back to the hotel to rest before dinner at the hotel. However we just had a quick meal before we headed out to the night market again! The Philippines team and Thailand translator also joined in as well while we got Jimmy to help bring us around the Shilin Market better as he pointed out some areas we missed yesterday.

Exciting dish of snake meat soup! Despite all the concerns, everyone was convinced to try some in the end (Yes, including the Philippines team and Thai translator!)

Interesting game of fishing for prawns lol. Basically if we catch a prawn, the shop will fry it for us and we eat it fresh on the spot! Pretty fun game, we spent a good half hour struggling with the prawns!

After that, we headed onto Jimmy's family cafe which was also in Shilin, where a lot of the local players were there as well. It was pretty interesting for everyone as we all got to play decks, while I was speaking to quite a few of them and exchanging info on how different players are like in Singapore and Taiwan. Basically we stayed till 1 before heading back to the hotel to do more trading and paying games. Really thankful to the Philippines players since they gave me (And Baha, since 1 of the cards was for him) quite abit of discount on cards as fans, thanks guys!

And thats about it folks! Will probably be playing deck more and sleeping less tonight. For tomorrow, the plan is to checkout by 11am, then head out to a couple of the local card shops as well as shopping areas. After that will get on a 7pm plane and arrive back after midnight. Will probably do that final post when Im back in Singapore, hopefully with pictures of card shops and stuff in Taiwan, though maybe only on Tuesday morning since I will be pretty dead tired when Im back. See you again when Im back!)

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And once again, here we are at the YGO information segment! Here are the decks used by the players from the various countries.

Singapore - TG Agent
Malaysia - Insectors
Philippines - TG Agent
Taiwan - Agent Angel (Jupiter build)
Thailand - Machina Gadget
Hong Kong - Agent Angel

Also, here are the deck lists of our finalists!

1st Place Winner deck list - Kee Kian Sim (Malaysia)

2nd Place Winner deck list - Rey Vincent M. Lim (Philippines)

Alright, finally done with the blog post, I'm off to finally have a chance to play deck with the representatives!