Championship Match Coverage

11/5
The championship match. Mami vs. Kyouko. Even though it's an intraseries match, expect it to be contested. There's several reasons why both Madoka and non-Madoka fans would vote for Kyouko, but Mami is still heading into this battle with the upper hand. After the DESU spam in the last match, we could see some fireworks. I'm predicting Mami, although I like Kyouko too, and the only thing we can really be certain of at this point is that a bunch of people are going to be butthurt at the end of the day.

Update: After 06:00, the two are neck and neck, although Mami is just barely ahead. It's likely that Kyouko is putting up a fake front and acting tougher than she is. Mami won or tied all the hourly bars after the first.

Update 2: The spam has continued heavily today, causing great disruption in the voting threads. There are threads being created titled "Lound" instead of the "Round" used in standard voting thread titles.

This mess indicates that the spam attack against Madoka was, as suspected, perpetrated by someone who's mad at the tournament in general, not by Mami's fans. It seems that Japanese Madoka and Mami fans have united to blame haters and trolls for the chaos, and a 2ch poll named Madoka's as the most regrettable loss of 2011.

The hankaku tracker is having trouble with these anti-spam measures, but the original tracker is back online and shows Mami pulling away from Kyouko in the last two hours, with a lead of 20 votes as of this writing. The tournament is in a state of pandemonium, and it's likely to get worse as we approach the finish line.

Update 3: Mami received a large spike of fake votes around 11:45. Voting seems to have accelerated for both characters, but after subtracting obvious fakes they remain very close.

Update 4: With three hours remaining, the voting thread has calmed down, and the spam has stopped. Time will tell whether the admins have dealt with it for good, or whether it will make a Charlotte-like comeback at the end of the match to bite off voters' heads.

There's a large number of votes for characters that aren't participating in the match. Not just the usual Akari Akaza, either. Many of them have realistic looking codes, but there's no way to tell whether they're real yet. Regardless, there's a strong theme of joke posting as a response to the Madoka domination.

Results: Tomoe Mami wins Saimoe 2011 with a 512-435 victory! Both characters unleashed impressive coordinated ASCII art rushes in the last hour. Rosso Fantasma actually had a tiny edge in votes, echoing Drama CD 3. However, Mami was the more experienced magical girl, and the lead she built up at the beginning of the match lasted long enough to allow her Tiro Finale to finish the tournament. Prediction Record: 1/1, 5/7 Finals, 122/159 Total, 76.729% Accuracy.