re: bo3 spl
in competitive games we want to create conditions that allow the better player to win a contest vs an inferior player as much as we can, within reason. we don't do this in SPL. i'll come back to within reason later.
one of the most important resources in SPL is time. You have ~7 days to to prepare yourself for your opponent. if you don't use your time well your odds of getting fucked, presumably, go up. a lot of the time we spend is crafting a team that a) has a good matchup against your opponent's team preferences and b) doesn't randomly lose to the rest of the teams in the metagame. i feel like we generally see a lot of people doing a) well but also see dudes get randomly blown up because of b) (i only really watch the cool games tho so idk if that's generally the historically the case, but it feels like it after the 5 or smthing SPLs I've been in).
again, in competitive games we want to create conditions that allow the better player to win a contest vs an inferior player as much as we can, within reason. if we could do a best of one million and one that would be dope. i wouldn't have to worry about losing to CALLOUS. but pokemon games don't take milliseconds and so we have to utilize our free time efficiently. With a bo3 we've cut down the amount of time everyone has to dedicate to one team because you have to, good sense would say, have at least 2 teams ready. in a bo3 your chances of losing to matchup go down. most players aren't just going to load up 3 anti-BKC teams in a bo3 cause BKC's less likely to run a traditional BKC team in 2-3 games. but in a bo1 BKC is probably going to go with a team that he is more comfortable with because he's probably better than his opp and he wants to run a team he likes. unfortunately in mons bo1 punishes this mentality and so his chances of getting blown up by matchup are higher. I don't think this is controversial yet. ya you should be mixing up your styles and all but that concern is partly addressed in a bo3 format
start controversy: it is within reason to have a bo3 for all SPL tiers as a bo3. yes, you have to spend more time testing three different teams, but those teams can be significantly less catered to counterstyling your opponent and more to counterstyling the metagame at large, with, of course, a privilege for also doing well against your opp's typical flavor of team. i don't think that building three teams for any given week would take a lot longer than what we have now. i anticipate that in a bo3 SPL players will get punished a lot softer for repeating teams throughout seasons and so they'll be more down to repeat teams. you can also just use more average teams against your opponent, especially if you win game one, if you perceive you're a way stronger player than them. also, if u win in 2 games you have that other team saved for later on in the season, reducing the time you spend preparing later. you will be playing up to three times as much pokemon vs your opponent, but I think most of us would agree that teambuilding and testing is a far greater time concern than playing against your opp. we all will definitely spend more time preparing for our SPL matches, but i anticipate the increase in time to be reasonable, and, maybe most importantly, less stressful because odds of losing to team matchups are dropped and losing to team matchup after preping for mad long is one of the most frustrating things about this game.
i could definitely be super wrong. but, if i'm not i think that bo3 has a potential for making SPL a way better tournament. it'd be cool if we could experiment for a week, maybe not in this SPL cause people would probably get super salty, but sometime and gather what people thought about the issue.
*note* I hated this idea for many years but Isa convinced me that this is the way to go