How We Ensure a Fair Fight for Our Pizza Cup Balloting

You would be forgiven for thinking that our annual Pizza Festival is the end of our pizza-eating season, but you'd be wrong – it's only the beginning! That's because the event itself marks the opening of our massive Pizza Cup, when the city's finest slug it out for the title of ultimate Pizza Champ.

In the interest of all that is fair and good in the world, and to ensure a clean fight when it comes to the most important of all democratic showdowns between Beijing's top food establishments, we here at the Beijinger pride ourselves on being as transparent and thorough in our voting mechanisms as possible.

Officiating a pizza contest can be a messy business

That means that we often have to go to extreme measures to stop the most enterprising and crafty of swindlers from showing off their nefarious ballot-stuffing tricks. As we have previously demonstrated, WeChat itself is a terrible platform for which to actually hold an untampered poll and present you with a clean winner.

When the Pizza Cup kicks off on Sunday midnight, just as the crowds are bedding down, bellies full from two full days of feasting on 30 of the best pizza restaurants in Wangjing Soho, we will achieve these results by taking a number of precautions:

• The voting platform itself is accessed via the user scanning a QR code through WeChat, which locks the vote to one individual account, meaning that there can only be one vote per round per user.
  

• Before you vote, each user will be asked to verify their location. If our mapping software does not place the user's location in Beijing, the vote will be automatically discarded.
  

• We also have additional reporting features that a normal WeChat poll doesn't, which include IP address verification and an answer timestamp. If these flag a user as having cheated, then their vote will also be automatically discarded.
  

• Our voting system is fully customized, making it much harder for users to ballot-stuff via manipulation of or gaps in the software.
  

With those points in mind, there are also a few differences, and similarities, in this year's voting.

1. Last year's initial Round of 88 is now a group stage of close to 100 competitors
Drawing from last year's bracket system, we've gone and expanded the initial Round of 88 to include close to 100 pizza vendors.

We've also used last year's seeding as a guideline and distributed the contestants into four brackets, thereby assuring the heavy pizza hitters are less likely to knock each other out in early rounds.

In this new group stage, you pick the Top 8 in each of the four divided brackets (not familiar with 8? Just pick your favorites). These Top 8 will go into the Round of 32, seeded by their strength of victory.

From then on out, it's head-to-head single elimination until a winner is declared.

2. Winner-take-all bracketing
Also as with last year, every pizza will be going head-to-head but there'll also be a few separate mini-contests to rank variations that don't necessarily fit under the standard banner of "pizza" but are pretty damn close – things like Baozza, jianbing pizzas, calzones, and the like. We'll announce that bracket later on so we can crown the kings of the pizza-related fusion alternatives.

Moving onto this weekend's Pizza Festival, all early bird tickets (which came with a swanky little blanket) are sold out, so are advanced tickets. You will need to purchase your tickets on the door at Wangjing Soho.

And with that, dear voter, you can now sleep sound in the knowledge that this year will once again determine the ultimate champion of our favorite food in the world, in Beijing. Let's make this year's Pizza Festival the best yet. Read all of our content leading up to this year's competition here: thebeijinger.com/2017pizzacup and make sure to vote once voting kicks off on Sunday night!

Tickets for the event will cost RMB 25 at the door. Shove all the pizza you can into your face from now until September so that you can better revel in the joy that is the Beijinger 2017 Pizza Festival. You'll need it to fuel your carnival costume-making imagination!

Special thanks go out to this year's event space, Wangjing Soho, where all the action will take place September 16-17, 11am-8pm.

Photos: Uni You, the Beijinger

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