Seeding
CAPTAINS' WEIGHTED BALLOTConsensus seeds
| Seed | Team | Score |
| 1 | dicE · dicE [::] | 1.49 |
| 2 | icyHOT · icyHOT ~ | 1.57 |
| 3 | North Atlantic Treaty Org · NATO | 2.64 |
| 4 | onLAN thunder · FJTM | 3.21 |
| 5 | Arrested Development · BLUTH | | 4.86 |
| 6 | Best Buds · [bb] | 5.56 |
| 7 | NoSoul · NoSo ! | 5.84 |
| 8 | b Team · b. | 6.92 |
| 9 | Price is Right · [$] | 7.51 |
| 10 | Uncle Rico's Time Machine · uR[TM]* | 9.00 |
Lower score = stronger. Seeds shown are the live consensus; staff lock them onto the bracket with “Compute & lock”.
Strength of Schedule
FAIRNESS AUDIT — COMPUTED & VERIFIEDCould Saturday's draw be any fairer? Command put the question to the machine. Every one of the 11,180,820 legal ways to draw this ten-team field — each team facing six of the other nine, no rematches, no top-four meeting before Round 4 — was enumerated and scored on the evenness of its schedules. A perfectly even field is provably out of reach: no draw in that space gives all ten teams an identical slate. The draw that was selected, and how it scores, is set out below.
The draw, measured
Mean slate strength is fixed at 33 for every possible draw — only the spread moves. On this one every team lands between 30 and 37: a gap of 7 seed-points across the whole field, on a scale that runs from 21 to 45. Nobody runs a gauntlet and nobody coasts. Every headline game survives it, too — all six meetings between the top four seeds are on the card, with 1 v 2 closing the day.The evidence — each team's slate
| Seed | Team | Six opponents (by seed) | Strength of schedule |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | dicE · dicE [::] | 2 3 4 5 7 9 | 30 |
| 2 | icyHOT · icyHOT ~ | 1 3 4 5 8 10 | 31 |
| 3 | North Atlantic Treaty Org · NATO | 1 2 4 6 7 10 | 30 |
| 4 | onLAN thunder · FJTM | 1 2 3 6 8 10 | 30 |
| 5 | Arrested Development · BLUTH | | 1 2 6 7 8 9 | 33 |
| 6 | Best Buds · [bb] | 3 4 5 7 8 9 | 36 |
| 7 | NoSoul · NoSo ! | 1 3 5 6 9 10 | 34 |
| 8 | b Team · b. | 2 4 5 6 9 10 | 36 |
| 9 | Price is Right · [$] | 1 5 6 7 8 10 | 37 |
| 10 | Uncle Rico's Time Machine · uR[TM]* | 2 3 4 7 8 9 | 33 |
Mean 33.0 · range 30–37 on a 21–45 scale. The bar reads difficulty — a fuller bar means a tougher draw (facing lower, stronger seeds) — and is drawn against the full range of slates a team could have been dealt, so the bars sit close together because the slates genuinely are close together.
Method. Each captain ranked the other nine teams (1 = strongest); ballots are weighted by the ranking team's own standing and iterated to a fixed point, so stronger teams' opinions carry more weight (lower score = stronger = better seed). A team's strength of schedule is the sum of its six opponents' seed numbers. The audit scored that figure's spread across all ten teams for every legal draw — subject to the two standing rules, no rematches and no top-four meeting before Round 4 — and the draw was picked to hold that spread tight while keeping the games worth showing up for. Chasing the last of the spread means giving up marquee games, and the difference it would make is smaller than a single map can swing in a best-of-one.