SOM Convention

As stated on the home page, there is a tradition since 1972 of conducting national and international tournaments with all the different Strat-o-matic Sports games that exist. From 1972 – 1980, there were yearly conventions held within the U.S. So, a question was asked then:

“How could we recreate the conventions from before in a way and form that as many people as possible could participate in without having to spend a lot of money to travel to a location far from their home?”

Star Tournament Association for several years now has been conducting some of their tournaments using the internet to allow the participants to play against each other from within anywhere in the world. They used two methods, Skype (a free program that turns your computer into a free phone) and Netplay (the utility program part of the SOM Baseball game that allows two people to play each other over the internet) to play their tournaments online and it has worked extremely well.

Wolfman Shapiro, the editor of the Ultimate Strat Baseball Newsletter with his partner Marc Wasserman began a dialogue with Star Tournaments via two of their board members Pete Nelson and Gene Abood as well as spoke to Pure Strat President, Bryan Albin and these three organizations agreed to work together to co-create, organize and setup a new form of the Convention with the SOM Baseball Game in October of 2013 that would be available to any gamer who wishes to participate. A Tournament using Netplay with a draft will be offered over a weekend with the playoff and championship series to be determined a few weeks after the convention weekend is concluded.

We were hoping to offer a tournament that would be played following the format that was used in the old conventions involving switching teams with your opponent (an idea that Mr. Richman, the creator of Strat-o-matic suggested) but we needed to use Skype to make this tournament happen and people still are used to playing live and on-line with skype. The three originating members for this convention have decided to call themselves collectively, the Strat Alliance. This website will contain all the information a tournament contestant will need to prepare to complete in this 1st International Convention.