My friends and I went to Singapore to play in the Epic World Championship. We left on Wednesday so we could be prepared for our Thursday morning game. It's actually been a few years since I left the country and even had a road trip so it was kind of fun. It was all good until the first day of the event. My partner wasn't able to sleep well and he wasn't able to get his coffee so he was struggling in our matches. We ended up winning one game and losing three. The one game we won was against a team that beat everybody else so I feel like we should've been able to beat everybody.
Honestly, for a big tournament like this, it was kind of disappointing. They collected a lot of money and there was a lot of sponsors so we would expect some standard but there kind of wasn't. My first complaint would be the changing of the pool. We checked the draw the night before and it just changed the morning after waking up. The first draw didn't even make sense because it was a pool of 3 teams and each team played each other twice. The second draw was better because there was 4-5 teams and they would each play each other once but they shouldn't have made the draws live until it was confirmed. Another weird thing was for a tournament with over 64 teams it's weird to take an odd number like 87 teams. It's better if it's divisible by 8 or even should've been capped at 64. We believe they went to try to earn more money with more participants but it came at the cost of the tournament experience. There was also someone part of the organizing team that participated. For me, I've always felt it's not right for an organizer to participate in their own tournament. We suspect they wanted to fill more slots to even out because as I mentioned they took in extra teams.
Another thing that I didn't like about what Epic did is they gave discounts to people that joined later. That's super unfair for those that paid early; I can't really complain since we had a partner discount. On top of that, registration started at 6:30am but they didn't have any food or coffee for people which my friend and I thought would be something basic for an event. Our games were supposed to start at 7:30AM but it didn't start until 8:30AM. On top of that, one of the teams came late and they shuffled our matches which we felt was weird. In any sport I've played and experienced, this was a first. From my experiences, during a tournament, normally a late team would be walkover and lose by default for not showing up on time with the 5-10 minute buffer from the start of their game. Some of the volunteers didn't even know what they were doing because they always had to refer to somebody else. There was a lot of confusion of which court to go on. We had to ask around and then they also put the name tag of the court wrong. I told one of the referees and they were like it's ok. Then they later changed their mind and said oh ya we will go switch that tag with the other one. Then we got vendor coupons which could be used on vendors but they only had one item that could be used for the voucher. It was really bizarre for me when I found out about that. I could probably roast this event for a few more paragraphs but I will just leave it at that.
On the bright side. we got a picture with the COO of DUPR which is the rating system for pickleball players to see a number for their skill level. I was also able to share my thoughts and also get some insights on what they were going to do on improving the app and doing something about buayas which may be better known as sandbaggers in other countries.
I also got to meet 
Since we are out of the tournament, we will chill in Singapore for one more day and then head back to Malaysia. Well, that wraps up my post until next time~