One of me and my friends' favourite pastimes is playing multiplayer Pro Evolution Soccer on PlayStation 2. Although the controls of the game take some time to get used to, when you get the feel of the game the experience is awesome. Add 5 of your friends interacting with you through the game to this experience and you have the perfect definition of great time.

Well, who wants to have great time when you can enjoy the gut-flinching feeling of fierce competition with your peers? I thought that sometimes you could switch the relatively laid-back feeling of generic PES multiplayer gaming to somewhat more competitive mode. As it is, we try to divide the players evenly between teams to avoid having to play against AI and also to avoid clogging up the field too many players in the same side.

But how would you arrange such a competitive event? Here are my thoughts how to best arrange a PES tournament for two-player teams among your friends. What you need is an interesting setting and parity (or balance) between the teams.

Part One: The Setting

The competition setting hass always played a large part in our PES nights. For the most parts we've set up the cups and brackets to reflect the next major international cup, i.e. the European Cup or the WC. We've also played a couple of African Nations Cups and Champions League(only the latter phases if I remember correctly). Similar approachseems to be the way to go also in a more competitive setting.

If you are playing with paired teams you and in a competition mode you most likely don't want any AI teams in the mix and want to finish in one evening. So, whole EC or WC with group stages doesn't sound a viable option. What you could do instead is play the play-off stage or a part of it.

The drawback on a play-off (elimination) cup is that the losers of first matches get only play that one game. So, if you don't mind going low on realism you might want to switch the play-off to another group stage with single or double match rounds. With four two-player teams (about the max in our group) that leads to 10 matches with a single round (3 matches per team) or 20 matches with a double round. So maybe the single round is better. Add a final four the top two teams and you have 11 matches. 

So, maybe we'll play the final four of this year's Champions League with our group if we get to arrange this kind of competition.