There are three things that people know about what I (Adam) love about professional wrestling. I love wrestlers using a bunch of masked goons to do their bidding, I love when wrestling is secondary to oscarbait tearjerker shenanigans, and Adam Blampied loves a tournament. I love tournaments so much. They’re the perfect foundation for telling wrestling stories.
Every match carries weight, you can put together a bunch of dream matchups just because, you can tell multi-match-long storylines, make new stars, christen feuds, tournaments are the best the best the best. AEW’s currently running the Owen Hart Cups and they’ve already created magic in the form of Dax vs Cash, tournaments are the best, but it got us thinking, just which tournaments are the very best?
Honorable Mentions:
The WCPW World Cup
Haven’t put it on the list because I’m a bit biased but sod it we actually made the fucking thing work and we were INCREDIBLY proud of it & also, specifically because Luke Owen asked me to.
TNA’s Fight for the Right 2007
A tournament that started with a reverse battle royal and was won by a man who wasn’t in the tournament when it started, who got to the final by beating a man who’d already been eliminated from the tournament.
10. WWE Gold Rush
There are very few things that WWE can say they consistently do well, but honestly, tournaments might just be the thing.
There’s a bunch of WWE tournaments that could have made this list – the NXT UK Championship tournaments were both good, the NXT Breakouts, and of course the Brawl For All, everyone’s favourite. Fucking HIT HIM. But often overlooked is the WWE Gold Rush tournament from 2005, to determine a number 1 contender for Batista’s World Heavyweight Championship.
The lineup’s insane; Benoit, Kane, Edge, Triple H, Jericho, Shawn Michaels and Shelton Benjamin, their famous match featuring THAT famous Superkick is from this tournament. The match quality was great, and featured a long-running story of Edge using his Money in the Bank briefcase to cheat his way through the tournament and into Lita’s heart. Top quality TV.
9. Mae Young Classic
Always a bit odd to go back and look at the Mae Young and CWC, seeing as they operated as feeder systems into the big dub. 5 years on from the first incarnation of the tournament, it’s absolutely STUFFED with talent.
Bianca Belair, Candice LeRae, Kimber Lee, Shayna Baszler, Kairi Sane, Toni Storm, Dakota Kai, Rhea Ripley, bloody loads of amazing wrestlers. Of course this was 5 years ago and so the hype around some of these talent wasn’t as fever pitch as it might be today, but both Mae Youngs definitely made some superstars and prepped them for greatness, Baszler, Sane, Shirai, Storm.
Some absolutely stellar matches and a huge injection of top talent into WWE’s ranks. Just a shame the tournament’s trophy wasn’t a giant walking hand.
Best incarnation of the tournament: 2017, but only just.
8. King of the Ring
Yeah that’s right, it’s not in the top 5, and honestly nor should it be. Don’t get me wrong, the King of the Ring tournament has created some stars, Austin, Triple H, Lesnar, Angle, but oh boy it’s real hit and miss, with plenty of duds thrown in there. Poor Billy Gunn. IT DOESN’T MATTER THAT YOU WON KING OF THE RING. Also Sheamus’s crown makes him look like a stag beetle.
Generally speaking the tournament is a good thing, but the main problem with it is that WWE doesn’t treat it as important anymore, it’s no longer one of the big 5 PPVs of the year and there’s nothing really on the line anymore, other than the heel gimmick of ‘dress fancy, is prick’.
There’s no denying that it’s still got name value, and was a treasured piece of WWE’s past, but not quite so much anymore.
Best: 2002, when something was actually on the line, the World Title Shot at SummerSlam, featuring some belting matches like Test vs Brock Lesnar. HOSS.
7. AEW World Championship Eliminator
The Owen Hart Foundation Tournament’s been absolutely great so far, but feels wrong to put it on the list before its conclusion, but even in its short history AEW’s put on some crackerjack tourneys.
The inaugural Tag Title Tournament populated the very first run of Dynamite shows, the TNT tournament was great, but the most reliable format has to be the World Championship Eliminator. Each year, 4-8 wrestlers battling each other for a shot at the title. It’s only been around for three years but their list of winners, Jon Moxley, Kenny Omega and Bryan Danielson, speak for themselves.
Best incarnation of the tournament: 2020. Penta vs Rey Fenix is a perfect example of a tournament match, saw the furthering of the Omega heel turn, plus that meme, and a crucial final that would play a major part in the all-time great Hangman storyline.
6. Best of the Super Juniors
Heading over to New Japan, who love a tournament almost as much as this fucking guy. (referring to Adam, obvs) Super Jr Tag League, Super J-Cup, the World Tag League, New Japan Cup, one other tournament that we’ll mention later in the list, but one of the most influential, and quality-guaranteed is the Best of the Super Juniors, their light-heavyweight version of the G1 which is always stuffed full of wonderful matches, and often features some of the greatest up-and-comers from all over the world being invited to perform on New Japan’s big stage.
It’s such a wonderful melting pot of hot young stars, for example AEW’s Wheeler Yuta is taking part this year as is Ace Austin, and the former Ari Sterling from 205 Live Alex Zayne.
Best incarnation: 2019. Just wall to wall bangers. The final of Shingo Takagi vs Will Ospreay was especially ludicrous.
5. The Cruiserweight Classic
Can’t believe there’s only been one of these, it fucking ruled. Its shine might have been dulled in the [checks notes] SIX YEARS since the Cruiserweight Classic, mostly because of all the people who competed in it, so many are gone from the company.
No one from the final is still in WWE, no one from the semi finals and fuck it, of the quarterfinalists only Noam Dar and Akira Tozawa are still around, with one on the invisible NXT UK and the other one, well, you know, the double commitment ceremony. But that can’t detract from the fact that this one tournament back in 2016 had more stone cold classics than almost the entire King of the Ring combined.
Gargano/Ciampa, Kendrick/Ibushi, Ibushi/Alexander, Metallik/TJP, so much amazing stuff. Bring it back please. I know you hate the indies again WWE, but please it was so good!
4. The Dusty Rhodes Tag Team Classic
Tag team wrestling is the best. And you know what else was the best, NXT Tag Team wrestling. To be fair, with teams like GYV, The Creed Brothers, Legado del Fantasma, NXT 2.0 still has a healthy enough tag division, but back in the heyday of the Dusty Classic it was something else entirely.
And all of it to win a pair of Dusty’s boots but if he hit a green block from Super Mario. Over the years, the tournament’s featured so many amazing matches, the triple threat at Takeover New Orleans, DIY vs Aleister Black and Ricochet, DIY vs Undisputed Era, Broserweights vs Flash Morgan Webster and Mark Andrews, Grizzled Young Veterans vs MSK.
Every single year each tournament contains a couple of instant greats, especially ones that take place at a TakeOver. The only downside is that we’ve never seen anyone actually wear those shoes.
Best incarnation: 2020. Really hard to pick a best year, but the Broserweights story really is the heart and soul of the tournament, plus it’s sort of the apex of NXT’s last hurrah before the pandemic.
3. The Battle of Los Angeles
A Pro Wrestling Guerilla? Whatever next, a Tiger Mask? PWG was and is a one-stop short of wonderful indie buffoonery, a promotion that mostly revels in the silly bang-for-your-buck joke that is modern professional wrestling, but even when they’re not showcasing a bunch of indie legends waddling around the ring with their thumbs up each other’s literal bumholes, they put together some of the most exhilarating indierific wrestling this side of Ring of Honor.
And their grand showcase for PWG Does Proper Wrestling is always the Battle of Los Angeles, their yearly single-elimination tournament that’s been running since 2005 and always produces some amazing matches, and has seen winners that have gone on to become huge names, like Kenny Omega, Ricochet, Kyle O’Reilly and some guy called El Generico. Whatever happened to him?
Best: Well this is fucking hard, but let’s go with 2015, won by Zack Sabre Jr. Wait, 2017 had Keith Lee get to the final, but ah shit 2014’s final was Ricochet vs Roderick Strong vs Johnny Gargano. Oh I don’t know they’re all good, but all of them from independent wrestling’s glory years of 2012 -2017 will probably do you right. Dip in and enjoy.
2. The G1 Climax
Honestly, you could swap around the top two entries of this list and it would still be right, I know I did. The G1 Climax has a silly sex name, but Jesus pickling Christmas has it produced some of the best matches of the last decade.
The jewel in New Japan’s tournament crown, it’s been running under one name or another since the 70s, and when it was known as the IWGP League it was won by Hulk Hogan and Andre the Giant.
The appeal of the G1 Climax is pretty simple, two blocks comprised of many of the best wrestlers on the goshdarn planet, competing in a round robin tournament, meaning everyone wrestles everyone else in their block once in some of the sexiest, most violent, punchiest matches of the year, and since 2013 every tournament features just a bunch of matches that make you want to grab someone by the lapels and scream STOP WHAT YOU’RE DOING AND WATCH THIS MATCH.
The pinnacle tournament in company that was the pinnacle of professional wrestling in the 2010s.
Best incarnation: really tricky, but let’s go with 2017. After all there was an Okada/Omega match in this one. 2019 was really good too, Ibushi vs Jay White, yes please.
1. The Deadly Games Tournament
The G1 Climax is undoubtedly the greatest WRESTLING tournament in the world, but the best sports entertainment tournament, that would be 1998’s Deadly Games, that ran at Survivor Series to crown a new WWF champion after the belt was declared vacant because shenanigans.
Wrestling-wise, the tournament is mostly bollocks, however from a soap-opera booking perspective, it’s fucking perfect. One night of carefully engineered silliness, swerves, and screwjobs that manage to actually feel like a single cohesive story, rather than a jumble of Russo madness. So many wrestlers go on fun journeys on this one night, all the stories complementing each other.
Mankind goes in as the corporate protected stooge, but gets double-crossed and turns super face. Austin walks in as the favourite but is screwed during the semi finals. Undertaker and Kane play off their rivalry from earlier in the year, inadvertently placing The Rock in the final, and of course one of the greatest nights in the Rock’s life, entering as fan favourite number 2, subtly helped along by the Corporation in ways only obvious on a rewatch, that Bossman nightstick spot is perfection, before becoming the Corporate Champion.
It just all makes sense, the very best example of the overused concept of a swerve, and in front of the hottest of crowds. Garbage wrestling, but the greatest story a tournament’s ever told.
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