The 10th Annual Final Battle is a 24 hour long non stop marathon tournament taking place the weekend of November 8th-9th 2025
Cost of entry is $155. All players will receive a medal upon completion of the event and this year’s poster. Entries to this tournament will be limited to 100 spots with one spot reserved for the previous year’s winner if they choose to play and defend their title. Registration will be a lottery system that will open at 12AM June 16th at FinalBattle2025.eventbrite.com. Joining the waitlist on the Eventbrite page will confirm your spot into the lottery. Registration will close for the lottery On June 23rd at Midnight. Any player who joins the waitlist after this time will not be included in the lottery but will be added to the bottom of the waitlisted players from the lottery. The lottery will be held live in person at The Sanctum on Monday June 30th at 7:45 PM right before our weekly tournament. Everyone is welcome to come for the lottery drawing. This lottery will be drawn by a registered and secured system that will generate a code everyone can use to see results and it will also be recorded. Results will be posted on Tothesanctum.com after the lottery draw for everyone to see. All names will be entered and then randomly ordered by the generator. Players 1-99 will get in and starting at 100 will be the first spot on the waitlist All players who who were chosen in the lottery will have a ticket released via Eventbrite within 12 hours and will be emailed to purchase the ticket. If ticket is not purchased within 24 hours of being released you will forfeit your spot. Spots are NON TRANSFERABLE. All waitlisted players will be listed with their order in line on The Sanctum website. Waitlisted players are highly likely to be contacted at some point for an open spot. We often go far down our waitlist as time moves on. If you are waitlisted we recommended keeping the date open still as there is a good chance a spot will be offered to you at some point. PLEASE DO NOT USE AN EMAIL THAT YOU DO NOT CHECK DAILY. If you register with an email that you do not check every day we will not re release the tickets to you because you did not see the email. Your email will not be used for anything besides tickets and communication for this event. All ticket claims will be from eventbrite and go through eventbrite. Make sure they are not blocked by your spam filters.
We kick off the weekend with a pre tournament and Stern Pinball Star Wars launc party on Friday November 7th with a 3 strike knockout open to the public to give players a chance to see the games being used and try them out. Tournament will be held on pre DMD games to allow for the event to end in a timely manner. Cost of entry is $40 Tournament starts at 6 PM. The facility is closed at 10 PM so everyone goes home to rest. All prize money from this will be donated to The Andrea Ritz Clinics in Paraguay. Trophies and prizes for top players. High score leaderboard on Star Wars for the launch party Grand Champion trophy and prizes.
The main event starts Saturday the 8th at 10 AM. Doors to the facility open at 9 AM. This is a group matchplay format with straight Swiss seeding throughout the event. The first round will be a complete random pairing of groups.
Each round will be 4 player groups playing a bank of 3 preselected games. The first round will be random pairings. Scoring is 3-2-1-0. In the case of a player count where we have a 3 player group they will always be at the bottom and scoring will be 3-1.5-0.
After the first round is complete we will immediately start the next round. New groups will be formed by top points working our way down. Ties for groupings will be broken by the player with most 1st place wins and then go down to most 2nd place wins to break any further ties. Any critical ties for top positions after final round will be broken by a game of Stern Electronics Stars. We will play as many rounds as we can in the 24 hour block. Statistically we run 16 rounds for this event. Event will conclude at 10 AM Sunday the 9th
We will have a few small periodic breaks in between rounds to allow people to head out to local places for food/supplies. We will have a fridge for everyone to use and a water cooler. Please bring your own water bottle to fill to help us keep down on the waste and clutter of empty cups everywhere during the event. We have chairs and couches for seating but welcome people to bring folding type chairs for sitting in our hallway. We will be using matchplay.events for tracking results and this will provide notifications to all players.
Prize money will be structured as follows:
In years past starting with the first round we will have a $100 bounty available to any player who at any time during the 24 hour period can beat The Final Battle on The Shadow. With this being the 10th running of the Final Battle we will pool together the 10 years of that $100 bounty and will have a $1000 bounty for anyone who completes it.
After round 1 if any player scores a perfect score of 9 for the round they will receive a bounty of 50$. If more than one player scores a 9 the 50$ bounty will be split between all of them. If no one scores a 9 the 50$ moves on to the next round and another 50$ is added to the bounty purse. This continues for every round and keeps building until collected and then starts fresh with another 50$ for the next round.
When we start the final round every group is playing for a prize purse. The top 4 players will be awarded trophies and the following cash prizes
1st place-$1500
2nd place-$1000
3rd place-$700
4th place-$400
After that the 4 players in each group below are playing for a prize purse for the winner of the group you are playing in. The higher your group number the higher the prize purse. The purses are as follows
Group 1-$170
Group 2-$165
Group 3-$160
Group 4-$155
Group 5-$150
Group 6-$145
Group 7-$140
Group 8-$135
Group 9-$130
Group 10-$125
Group 11-$120
Group 12-$115
Group 13-$110
Group 14-$105
Group 15-$100
Group 16-$95
Group 17-$90
Group 18-$85
Group 19-$80
Group 20-$75
Group 21-$70
Group 22-$65
Group 23-$60
Group 24-$55
Group 25-$50
This is all based on a full field of 100 players and is subject to change based on entry fee and if the field is not full when we start the event.
This is a marathon tournament so there is no finals and anything can happen in the last minute just like in a marathon. Don’t let someone with a burst of energy bolt past you in the final round!
Every player who plays for all 24 hours and never sits out a round will be awarded a completion medal just like finishing a marathon. These will be custom cast medals just for this event.
Refund Policy as follows:
75% Refund before August 11th
50% Refund before September 22nd
25% Refund before October 26th
No Refunds after October 26th