Since we have a combatant in the tournament already who is capable of time-travel, I thought it best to provide some brief discourse on what can and cannot be done with it.  Some of you probably think it's the ultimate trump card.  Go back and kill someone before they were born, and you win, simple as that.

WRONG.  Let me explain.  The idea here is twofold.  First of all, no outside interference is permitted.  If you go back to kill someone before they were born, this means you have to fight their mother at the very least, and quite possibly the doctor and staff, the father...you get the point.  Second, the location might be off-limits.  The question is, in 51 out of 100 places, who wins in a fight?  That means they won't always--if at all--fight in either of their birthplaces.  In fact, the odds are very strongly against it.  Furthermore, imagine they're fighting in exact duplicates of places they know.

The rules become fuzzy when dealing with something like a country.  If Ares were to fight Latveria, for example, the idea is that he's only fighting present-day Latveria.  So imagine the entire country has been teleported to another world...he would not be able to go back and erase its history.

Ares' advantage in being able to time-travel is that if he's fighting a mortal, he can just travel forward in time to a point where they've died of old age and get an easy win.  He can also go back multiple times and have more than one of himself on the battlfield...but if the earliest version of himself dies, all of them cease to exist.

Hopefully this clears some things up for next week!

So I've just posted two fights for the week for the first time, as opposed to the usual one.  I figure I'll run one fight per week from every round that's currently in progress, and I'm predicting a total of 13 rounds.  Think how many contenders that means there will be!  Yeah, it's a LOT.  Do the math.

Speaking of math, and you might wonder how this relates at first...I'm sure you've all noticed that the two current matches--Ares vs. Jefferson and Thanos vs. Chewbacca--seem more than a little bit lopsided.  Well guess what?  They ARE.  If you disagree, by all means vote for the underdog.  I'll be shocked if the underdog ends up winning, but chances are they won't.  So why am I taking votes on these?  It all relates to an idea imposed upon mathematicians-in-training by their teachers known as showing one's work.  If any of us wants to claim that the ultimate victor in this tournament can beat all the other contenders, we need to be able to see how their victory was determined.  If we discover that Spider-Man and Batman are perfectly even when matched against each other based on their wins and losses and what order those all occurred in, we can't just make up who they won and lost to.  No, we have to be fair.  We have to give them a chance and see how it all plays out.

So this week may seem like a waste of time to some of you.  To others, it's a good example of how this tournament is ultimately meant to work.  Stick it out for the long haul and you will see results.  There's a rea

So we're on the second fight that this site has done thus far, and I have to say, it's been a slow start.  I really need to acquire more voters, but I'm afraid that the only way to do that will be to introduce more combatants that people are interested in.  I've been to numerous facebook and myspace groups and numerous forums all over the web, trying to recruit people.  I've gotten a few votes here and there, probably all from my friends...so what will keep everyone else coming back?The forum.  If I can get people talking in the forum, I'll have regular visitors.  There's a link from the forum to here, also, so it should be a piece of cake once we get some interesting discussions started.In the meantime, on Sunday people will get a better idea of just how this tournament's intended to be run.  Thanos won the first fight, and it looks like Chewbacca's going to win the second one.  If he does, then the first round 2 match will be between Thanos and Chewie.  The second will be Latveria vs. Tarantula.  Both should be curbstomps, but it's all part of following procedure in order to come up with results.I figure I'll run one fight from each round that can be fought each week.  So the number of fights per week should increase gradually, steadily, over the course of the next few years.  Yes, I'm well aware that I'll be at this forever if I intend to come to some kind of conclusion.In the coming weeks, we'll see everything from actors to revolutionaries to groups of people in vans to gods of war enter the competition.  Get ready for some craziness as only I can provide!