2022 Sponge Cup
The 2022 Sponge Cup will likely begin around November 21, 2022, and conclude around December 18, 2022, in order to coincide with the 2022 FIFA World Cup. I estimate that we will have around 310 half-hours and close to 600 individual episodes as at the show's current rate of episode-making, we will be near the middle-end of season 14. This is almost 33% more episodes than were in the 2018 Cup, so there might be a little more time/rounds needed. More information will come in 2022.
2020 Summer SpongeLympics
The 2020 Summer SpongeLympics will begin around July 24, 2020 and conclude around August 9, 2020, in order to coincide with the 2020 Tokyo Summer Olympics.
More information will come in 2020.
2018 Sponge Cup
The Sponge Cup is a planned tournament to see what ESB's favorite episodes are. It is inspired a bit by BF10's similar tournament held earlier this year, but the difference is that mine will not be separated by era and instead held in the forums as a H&H game rather than voting in blogs.
My tournament will be inspired a bit by the World Cup, with a group stage (in which all episodes will be divided into groups) and then the winners (or top 3 or top 5, I'll see later) will move on into a final round, in which the episodes will be ranked. It might take a fair bit of time to complete unless other users are willing to help by running the Hurt and Heals for multiple groups at the same time.
Group Stage
As of me writing this (June 30, 2018), there are 443 episodes released. The plan is to divide these 443 episodes into 16 groups, although there is a remainder, so 5 groups will have 27 episodes, and the other 11 groups will have 28 episodes.
In general, most groups will contain AT LEAST 10 episodes from seasons 1-5 (2 each), 12 episodes each seasons 6-9 (3 each), 1 episode from season 10, and 2 episodes from season 11. This adds up to only 25, so I will randomly choose 2 or 3 more episodes from the entire series to fill it up. These episodes are known as Wild Cards.
Since each season has a different amount of episodes, expect me to deviate from this formula a bit towards the last few groups. In particular, I will be projected to run out of episodes from seasons 6 and 8, while I will have excess episodes from seasons 1-5, 7, 9, and 10 (meaning all Wild Cards will be from these eight seasons) and season 11 will be perfectly distributed.
The total number of Wild Card episodes allotted per season across the whole tournament is as below. This list is mainly for me to keep track of while ordering the groups.
- Season 1: 9 (all used)
- Season 2: 7 (all used)
- Season 3: 5 (all used)
- Season 4: 6 (all used)
- Season 5: 9 (all used)
- Season 6: None
- Season 7: 2 (all used)
- Season 8: None
- Season 9: 1 (all used)
- Season 10: 6 (all used)
- Season 11: None
Here are the groups. I will select all episodes through RNG.
Anyone can start a H&H for this tournament, just make sure I have already selected the group's episodes (listed on this page) beforehand.
Final Stage
The final stage will be a single-elimination bracket consisting of 64 episodes, the top four winners from each of the 16 groups. The final round will still be voted on in H&H form, but in a very different manner from what we've done in the past rounds. Stay tuned for more information on what it is.
Bracket
Magnified top 16
Winners per season
