I became aware last week that the version of Wizards’s site that I thought was the oldest one that was archived by the Wayback Machine was in fact not the oldest. An older version from the 1998-99 era included coverage (“cybercasts”) of PT Chicago 1997, PT LA 1998, PT NY 1998, and PT Chicago 1998. Unfortunately these pages were only trawled a couple of times: incompletely in early 1999 and unsuccessfully in late 1999. When the site was redesigned sometime in 2000, the cybercasts were not ported, and all future sites have copied off of the information available in the 2000 version. I also saw rumors in a post on the Dojo that Worlds 1997 may have had some sort of internet coverage, but it predates even this older version of the site.

Here’s the status of those PTs: ptchi97 is relatively complete, but day one information was never posted in the first place because of technical issues at the tournament site. The cybercast only consisted of standings, so it would be a challenge to try to get pairings out of nothing. The three from 1998 are more promising: pairings and standings once were on the internet. ptla98 is intact except for round 4, but the Wayback Machine failed to capture any of ptny98 day two or ptchi98 day one. (There was one intervening event, PT Mainz 1997, which didn’t have a cybercast at all.)

I’ve reconstructed 156/164 matches from ptla98 R4 from tiebreakers, and that tournament is now on the site. I don’t think there’s hope to reconstruct the others from what’s available. I can almost imagine getting ptny98 back together if we had the final standings and tiebreakers; day two rounds have a small number of matches and the tournament reports that exist will fill some of it in, which might give me a toehold. On the other hand ptchi98 is missing day one, which is a much bigger disaster—the rounds are bigger and people will go 0-4 drop which means they won’t show up in tiebreakers except as the minimum .3333. This makes it impossible to recover their matches from the standings.

Still, I thought that after I added Kansas City 1999 that I wouldn’t have any more old data to add, so getting another Pro Tour is pretty cool! Now I’m aware of five tournaments that were once on the internet that aren’t on the site. Here’s hoping that someday I’ll get extra information which lets me rebuild them! In my next post (which may not be for another month or so) I’ll discuss the reconstruction effort of gpkc99.