The brackets have been revealed and starting this week on AEW TV, The Owen Hart Tournament will culminate at AEW Double Or Nothing later this month. Both the men’s and women’s tournament are stacked with talent and features former world champions from around the world in both competitions. The tournament will follow a round by round knockout system – however that wasn’t the initial plan.
On the latest Wrestling Observer Radio, Meltzer explained how the original plans may have been for a round robin format similar to the G-1 tournament in NJPW. He also explained why this wouldn’t have been possible for AEW:
“The problem is that they do not have enough shows to do a G1-style tournament, because they don’t have enough shows to have eight fighters do seven matches each. There’s not enough time, so they cannot do a G1-style show.”
“Even if that’s what his [Tony Khan] original idea was, they just don’t have enough. Even if you put matches on Dark and Dark Elevation and everything, you really can’t pull that off, because your TV show, you could probably put a couple of matches on, but you don’t want a TV show where you’ve got six matches in two hours in the tournament and nothing else.”
“You’ve got to build up your pay-per-view card, and the tournament’s only part of your pay-per-view card. The nature of TV and everything like this just doesn’t lend itself to a tournament like that. Maybe he wanted to try it, but again, when you just kind of look at the situation, it’s kind of like, well, it’s not like you can ignore an entire pay-per-view just to build up this tournament. You really can’t. By process of elimination, you either do an elimination or you do a round-robin, and the round-robin, you just really couldn’t do.”
Dave Meltzer on The Wrestling Observer Radio
Time will tell if the simple bracket format will produce the same critical acclaim as the round robin style of the G1. Either way – the tournament is expected to be an exciting event for both sides of the AEW roster.
H/T to Ringside News For Transcription
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