This review is more for anyone who wasn't at the tournament, but wanted to know how it went.

1) Konami hired people who knew nothing about the game.
2) Konami didn't ship the tournament parts/supplies to Seattle Gameworks. (apparently they did - conflicting reports)

Coming into the tournament, nobody from the Seattle area had high expectations, due to the horrible news we had heard about the previous tournaments. Overall though, most of us were fairly impressed with how well things actually worked out, despite everything that could have gone wrong.

There were 34~ entrants, with the majority of players (including the top ones) being from our PNWBemani forum here. The top picks going into the tournament were our top players, several of whom were practicing for a couple weeks for the tournament. They were Keby (Kevin), Amber, and Suko, all of which placed in the top 4, with the exclusion of Andy Burns, who was a surprise entrant who did very well!

As said earlier, the staff knew nothing about DDR. This led to some humorous lines, such as "Keep your stuff off the DDR," and an announcer who was funny, but knew nothing about the game. This also led to some bad parts, such as the staff 1) Not knowing you can't play a tournament song on Extra Stage, 2) Accidentally choosing the wrong song half of the time, 3) Not knowing why players were complaining about the pads.
Seattle Gamework's pads have never been in tournament condition, although to their credit - the pads were repaired several times the day of the tournament, and were almost to the level of Bill's (Masterman Vending) machines during tournaments ran at his venues.

The tournament staff were temporary hires from craigslist, with the exception of the Konami Rep who was intent on having everything done her way. To their credit, we were very thankful that they acknowledged that the pads needed repaired several times, however they only started caring after Kevbo (Kevin Boddy, who was here from out of town) talked to them. Since he was the winner from one of the other Regional DDR Tournaments, apparently he had enough credibility for this lady to listen to him. Thankfully he was there, because they let him even test the pads after the repairs to make sure they were ok... but if he wasn't there I have a feeling our tournament wouldn't have been so good.

For a tournament that started at 1PM, they were still at the final 8 at 6PM. I had to leave at that point, so I don't know how the rest of the tournament went. It was long because the staff didn't know what they were doing for two of the parts, and took a 1hr break to eat, a 30 min break to figure out who moved on/bracketing... and the bracketing wasn't seeded properly, so several players went over to get that fixed.

All the songs were chosen from the official song lists provided, with the tournament staff spinning a prize wheel to choose which song got chosen. The wheel was not very well calibrated, as there was about 40 minutes of The Least 100 Seconds played during the tournament. And she had to rewrite the songs on the wheel several times to get them evenly distributed.

The winners/placement was:
1) Amber
2) Kevin (Keby)
3) Andy Burns
4) Suko

It was a fun time, as the majority of our Seattle DDR Community was there. This will probably be the biggest tournament we will have in our area, as it also had some entrants from outside the community. It was a good time, and thankfully didn't turn out as bad as we were expecting. The Seattle Gameworks staff and manager were very nice and helpful at making sure the tournament ran ok, the tournament staff were ok once Kevbo showed them the pads sucked, and almost everyone had a good time.

Hopefully we can get enough community support to have a few more tournaments with a good sized turnout!

Some pictures are already uploaded in our photo gallery, and I'll be adding mine in a few days. If anyone else has some feel free to upload them as well!

Thanks to everyone who showed up to the tournament. It was a fun time!  

Edited based on the info Laura posted below.