Tournament:IVGF NorthWest Regionals

IVGF Northwest Regionals
Dates	March 1st, 2003
Venue	Meydenbauer Center
Address/City	11100 NE 6th St Bellevue, Washington 98004
Entry fees	$50
Pot size(s)	$12,500.00
Results
winners	Recipherus
Staff
Organizer(s)	International Video Game Federation, GameClucks

International Video Gaming Federation Northwest Regional Festival and Tournament, shortened as IVGF Northwest or IVGF Seattle, was a Super Smash Bros. Melee superregional tournament run by the International Video Game Federation on March 1st, 2003 alongside Tekken 4, Halo: Combat Evolved, and Unreal Tournament 2003: Death Match. The ruleset for the tournament seems to have been "1v1, best of 1, double elimination, items on medium, almost all stages on random". Recipherus was the winner, while fellow NorCal players, Matt Deezie and Adam, rounded out the top three. The tournament is most notable for its absurdly large pot size for the time of $12,500, supplied by the IVGF, though the tournament also had an unusually high $50 entry fee to compensate. Recipherus' winnings of $8000 would stand as the record for the largest prize payout from a Smash tournament for over three years, until it was exceeded by PC Chris winning $10,000 from MLG Las Vegas 2006. There have also been claims of the tournament having had 151 entrants, which would have made it the largest Smash tournament of all-time until MELEE-FC3 got 186 entrants over two years later. However, the tournament has no known official documentation of its results, nor has any other definitive source been found to prove this number's veracity, and the possibility of such an anomalously large tournament for the time occurring in a remotely located region has been met with skepticism. The attendees beyond the top three are also largely unknown; it is believed that top Pacific Northwest players at the time like Rori were in attendance, as well as Japanese player Kei, who was living in the region at the time, but other than that, there are no other notable attendees known to have entered the tournament, casting further doubt on the veracity of the 151 entrants claim.

As implied by the event's name and as stated on IVGF's website, this was the first event of a planned 10-city 2003 circuit. Given the lack of any word of the other events ever occurring, it appears IVGF cancelled their planned circuit and ceased operations after this first event. The other planned locations were: Northern California (San Francisco/ San Jose); Southern California (Los Angeles/ Orange County); Rocky Mountain Region (Denver, CO); Southwest Region (Dallas, TX); Mid-America Region (Chicago, IL); New England (Boston, MA); Greater New York (New York City/ Meadowlands); Mid-Atlantic Region (Philadelphia, PA); and Southeast Region (Atlanta, GA).

Results

This tournament article lacks a complete results table. However, the results it lacks may be lost to history. If they're able to be found, you can help SmashWiki by adding the missing results. The editor who added this tag elaborates: A more complete results table for a supposed 151 entrant tournament in 2003 would be very desirable, but it's incredibly unlikely a real source for those results still exist.

Place	Name	Character(s)	Earnings
1st	Recipherus		$8,000
2nd	Matt Deezie		$3,000
3rd	Adam		$1,500

External links

• Seattle Times article
• Archived website snapshot from June 3, 2003
• Tournament thread from themachine.com ^{(dead link)}
• Biggest Melee tourneys of all-time - A r/smashbros thread by Juggleguy, in which a reddit user named fftrade claimed the tournament had 151 entrants, but did not provide any evidence when disputed by Juggleguy and other users.
• Archived results thread for MELEE-FC1 - While the thread was about MELEE-FC1, a Washington Smashboards poster by the name of Yagi would dispute the claim of it being the largest tournament ever at the time, claiming that IVGF had 151 entrants, albeit still without evidence nor any other elaboration. Yagi also provided details about the ruleset (Ctrl+F for "IVGF").