Due to its subjective nature, the USCL Game of the Week (GOTW) Contest has always been a great source of anticipation, drama, and controversy within the League. How will it end up working in 2014? Well read on to find out!
We will follow a similar format as we have done in recent years with a few moderate changes. This year, with the larger number of games being played each week, there will be five finalists every week rather than three. The prizes this year will also be larger; during the regular season, they will be $150 to the 1st place game and $50 to the 2nd place game (the prize going entirely to the winner of the game and being split evenly if it’s given to a drawn game).
We will again have five judges, but the makeup of the judging panel will be slightly different.
With our esteemed commissioner, Greg Shahade, being out of the country for the whole season, it did not make much sense for him to be involved in the choosing of the finalists. With him unable to watch the games live as he usually does and with him also unable to look at the games until many hours after their completion, getting the five finalists to our judges swiftly was another issue. Hence for this season the five finalists will be chosen entirely by Arun Sharma.
Combining this with the fact that Greg stated how much he missed people ribbing him for all the bad picks/votes he used to make when being a GOTW judge several years ago - with Greg not being involved in the selection of the finalists, it seemed only natural that he return to the role of a judge for this season. As such, we will have three permanent judges who will be a part of this contest almost every week. They are:
IM Salvijus Bercys
FM Jason Doss
IM Greg Shahade
Due to the difficulty in looking/writing about five games every week, rather than asking a couple others to do this every week also, we will instead have a large panel of “guest judges” who will each judge a few times over the season, bringing us to five judges every week. This will keep the panel a bit fresh as well as giving many different people a chance to arbitrate. These guests will include, but may not be limited to:
WGM Tatev Abrahamyan
FM Alex Barnett
GM Cristian Chirila
IM Jake Kleiman
FM Mike Klein
FM Elliott Liu
GM Giorgi Margvelashvili
WIM Viktoria Ni
FM Arthur Shen
FM Eugene Yanayt
WIM Yuanling Yuan
WIM Iryna Zenyuk
With the larger prizes and a consistently changing panel, we hope this will contribute to this season of the USCL be the most exciting one to date!