I'm a Sur5or

Yesterday I had the massive pleasure of announcing the UKRDA Sur5al tourney at Tattoo Freeze.

"What's Sur5al Sven?" I hear you ask.  Let me break it down for you as simply as I can:

The rules(in a nutshell)
The tournament features multiple teams
Each team has 5 players.
Each jam lasts the full 2 minutes.
Teams face off against each other in single jams 1 after the other, so for example Rainy City play Royal Windsor in the 1st Jam, then Kent Roller Girls play London Rockin' Rollers in the second jam, then Rainy city play Tiger Bay etc.  You get the idea.
The actual jam score doesn't really matter as long as you know which team won the jam, and which team got lead jammer.  You get 5 table points if you win, 2 table points for a score draw and a bonus table point if you get lead.
The team with the most table points at the end of all the rounds is the winner.
The penalty box resets and if a player fouls out, their team skate short.

Yesterday we had 14 teams, playing 15 x 7 jam heats.  In my opinion this was the perfect format for the event we were at.  There were a lot of non derby folk there who were at the venue to see some impressive tattooing, graffiti and awesome VW campers and I saw the same faces returning to the trackside.  With Sur5al there is no investment of time from the spectator where they have to make the decision to stay and watch the full 60 minutes of derby to see who wins or go do something else.  They can dip in when they want throughout the day and always be guaranteed at least 2 minutes of fast paced  derby.  There are no slow jams, no tactical call offs after 25 seconds and (hopefully) no long winded team or official time outs.

A couple of points I noted that I think could improve the format for the fans:

1 - It needs a proper scoreboard.  Other than being super attentive to the jam refs hands, or having announcers that can do maths there is no way to know what the jam score is as it's happening.  I guess this is because of the config overheads of the regular derby scoreboards. I know someone will knock one up soon or modify an existing one(maybe even me). Until then, it's often guess work.  Any volunteers for this should get in touch with UKRDA.
2 - It needs a visible league table. A large whiteboard with the team names, games played and points total is all that's required here.

As I say, these are really minor points, and do not diminish the enjoyment I or any of the spectators, players or officials took from the tournament and my hat goes off to all the organisers from UKRDA who made it happen.

I can't wait for the next one!