As long as Diplomacy has been around there have been Diplomacy tournaments. It’s a competitive game and bragging rights gained from playing the best from all over, are prized over those gained from beating up on the same people in your club month after month. As the internet exploded onto the world during the 1990’s, so it seemed, Diplomacy enjoyed a similar explosion in popularity.

We had been running Cat23 since before the World Wide Web existed; back when internet meant you lived on closed forums such as Compuserve or Genie, (which is where Cat23 started, on Scorpia’s games roundtable, Category 23, Diplomacy). Like everyone else, we ran our own occasional tournaments, and it was a gentleman from Quebec named Maurice Jean who started the idea of playing a tournament composed of seven player teams. There weren’t enough of us to make much of a tournament, but it was something different from the same old thing.

When Genie closed in the early 90’s, Cat23 set up an independent presence on the web using list servers and webpages, and discovered we had set up shop in the middle of a busy freeway. As thousands and thousands of people poured into the net every month the number of people playing on Cat23 swelled from less than a hundred to nearly a thousand by 1998. It was at this point that a chance discussion between Emeric Mizti, and myself set the stage for a really, really large Diplomacy tournament.

Emeric was the co-owner of a small ISP in the UK called Cloud Nine. We discovered we both had a dream to create a large, independent place on the internet were people all over the world could play Diplomacy. Diplomacy was growing in popularity all over the world, but without a fixed, neutral forum with access to the technology to back it up, players were tending to stay in their own internet clubs. Worldmasters Email Diplomacy was born as a tournament with an alterior motive to get the Old World to play Diplomacy with the New World.

We set up websites, mailing lists, web forums and newsgroups in the early summer of 1999 and started spreading the word that we were going to run a team based Diplomacy tournament. At the time we were hoping we would get 20 maybe 25 teams to play and were positively giddy when we reached 50 teams and totally astonished when our final count was 79 teams for a total entrance of 553 players! Officially, still the largest Diplomacy tournament every run.

Apparently the Diplomacy community was ready for this team tournament idea. Along with the expected teams from the UK, France, Sweden, Germany, Norway, Denmark, Finland, the US, Canada and Australia and New Zealand, came the sudden appearance of teams from Ireland, Israel, Brazil and Yugoslavia. Much to our delight there were also teams from many different internet Diplomacy clubs as well such as the Vermont Group, Apolyton, Redscape and Abyssinian Prince. Suddenly the whole world was in one giant room and enthusiastically shaking hands with each other.

As everyone got to know each other, the Tournament Organizing Committee, led by Ted Miller, the Tournament Director, found themselves up to their elbows in work getting 79 separate Diplomacy boards set up. While they were doing so, the players began to engage in spirited games of ‘Team to Beat’ as they all sought to paint someone other then themselves as the team everyone else should gang up on. This spun off a few anonymous columnists and bookmakers who all seemed to go by the pen name, “Nathan Detroit”, and offered advice and odds for anyone who might be interested. These forums proved to be very popular and helped elevate Worldmasters from just another tournament, into an event.

In addition to being a team tournament, there was also an individual tournament thread built in. The entire field competed for 49 spots, which would play on seven semifinal boards, and each of these boards would yield one winner to sit at a single championship board. However, had we had any inkling that we would have such a huge turnout we would have greatly expanded the second round, something we remedied in the 2000 edition of the Worldmasters which had a more modest, yet still impressive turnout of 455 for 65 teams.

With all the well known power-house teams in the Worldmasters99, it was a surprise and also a delight when a team of relative unknowns called Stan’s Also Rans, a so called ‘scratch’ team that was put together from various individuals who wanted to play, but had no ready made team, beat out all the other teams to take top honors. On the individual side, Lee Simpson topped a board of excellent players from around the world to top the 1999 finals board.

But perhaps more important than anything else, was the way that this tournament connected players from all over the world. The idea of the Worldmasters as a neutral site took hold and people kept subscribing to the lists and forums. Lasting friendships were made and Diplomats from all over the world discovered there were lots and lots of people just like them.

The 2002 Worldmasters just opened up registration on October 15th, 2002 and will stay open till November 25th, 2002. Rudi van Hal will take the tournament director reins this time out and wishes to invite you and six of your friends to form a team and take on the rest of the world. Direct your browser to www.cat23.com/wm02. Don’t delay; rumor has it that there will be a large turnout.
 

  Raymond Setzer
(mczet@cat23.com)