Thursday night I will be making the annual journey to Las Vegas for the final time at the Bally’s Hotel; home of the largest Warhammer 40k tournament in the world, the Las Vegas Open. This year the Warhammer 40k Grand Tournament is sold out once again, now pushing 1000 tickets sold, expect though around 800 players to actually show up.

Once again Games Workshop will be getting involved, sending out the Twitch channel casters to broadcast live! The LVO will also have Forge World as usual. We can also expect a studio preview Thursday night to get everyone excited before the main events.

The main event though will be Warhammer 40k Championships with thousands of bucks on the line, a select 8 who when all is said and done will decide the next ITC champion.

Here are the current Top 35 players with over 1000 points going into the LVO Championships

As the event goes on I will be crossing out the Top 35 as they lose games, because 1 loss will almost certainly mean you are out of the running.

The championships will see year 2 of FIFA style card system: Yellow Cards and Red Cards. No Red card has ever been issued to my knowledge, but some think this could be the year with so many players and so many chances for douchery. The Top 200 tables will also have standardized identical terrain, without the much debated magic boxes.

The organizers and judges have taken extra care to inspect every army list and anyone can see for free on the BCP player app. No sneaky people making last minute changes are going to be allowed.

Like all previous large event coverage this post will be dedicated to images and updates from each round as the best players in the world duke it out, so keep on coming back for updates everyday at all hours of the day.

Blood of Kittens will also be Facebook Live casting at totally random times, so keep a look out for that on the Facebook page.

Blood of Kittens Facebook

As for some predictions before the event gets started, I will be on the lookout for a few of my favorites. The common prediction is at least 4 Space Marines armies will make into the Top 8. Since we will have so many players and lists needing to max out points is going to be key, it also means we could see some random lists make the Top 8, but mostly likely the same faces of the past should sneak in.

This is my Top 8 predictions.

• Sean Nayden
• Brad Chester
• Andrew Gonyo
• Nicholas Rose
• John Lennon
• Alex Harrison
• Mani Cheema
• Colin McDade

See you guys back here on Friday!

 Check back to this post from January 24th to 26th for Total Coverage

Round 1

Half way through round 1, nothing really exciting to report, we do though have a player on the verge of a red card with two yellows! So drama might actually happen. The Game to Watch is Brian Pullen vs. Thomas Goatboy, also how long it takes Mani Cheema to table his opponent…

Round 2

Wow, that a terrible turn of events with round 2 starting 2 HOURS late as BCP crashed and LVO was forced to use Google Sheets to put up the pairings! Round 1 saw some upsets with Jim Vesel (2) and Ben Cherwin (16), going down from the top 35. Not that many exciting match ups for round 2, with Junior vs. Curtis being the highlight.

Mani Cheema beat his opponent in about 30min even though he got seized on! Lucky for Mani he had hammer and anvil deployment so hide in the corner. It also looks like Brad Chester won his game. Nick Brown magic is in tight match that got a little easier as he was able to get Null Zone off with Morty and Magus allowing him to kill them both. Nick Rose looks to be incontrol of his game, as well TJ Lanigan should win thanks to a magic box protecting his Possessed.

Big news as Nick Brown Magic is out as he got to table his opponent, but lost on points!

Round 3

Wow, so a total of 4 hours of BCP crapping out has left us finally starting round 3. The news from round 2 so many hours ago, was once again Nick N. (4) lost and is out, along with Junior (27) going out to Justin Curtis. The big matches for round 3 though are going to be Brian Pullen vs. Andrew Gonyo this is a highly tactical battle with me having no idea who is going to win. As well, Alex Fennell vs. Daniel Hesters being a great old man battle. Sean Nayden vs. James Machenzie is going to be another drag out battle.

It will be interesting to see how much fatigue and lack of food will figure into how people will play, a good chance we see our first red card come out for some tired gamers.

So one of the big games in Round 3 was Mani Cheema winning his game by only 1 point in a low scoring affair. Team Raven Guard as I been calling them also won their games, Steve Pampreen, Brad Chester, Alex Fennel, Tyler Devries. Nick Rose also pulled out a tight game against Cyle Thompson winning by 2 point! Sadly Andrew Gonyo lost his game against Brian Pullen making breaking my perfect record so far for 8 finalists.

Of the top 35 losers, Brandon Grant lost his game because of a bad perils of the Warp. Jack Harpster, previously mentioned Andrew Gonyo, Ruben Fernandez

Round 4

We are down to the last 61 undefeated players with Sean Nayden leading the way just 9 points off of max points going against the infamous Aaron Aleong on Table 1. The next big game to watch out for is table 4 and Raymond Ahumada Elder Flyer List against top ranked Richard Siegler!

So we had a ton of games done real fast with Brad Chester and John Lennon leading the pack. One great story is Eulis Sanders is 4-0 with Necrons taking out both a possessed bomb and iron hands along the way. Adam Baker also won with Chaos Knights sadly against other Chaos Knights in a game that lasted about 30 mins.

With an hour left, Sean Nayden looks to be in control against Aaron Aleong and Siegler is cruising to victory against Eldar Flyers spam.Mani Cheema should complete his tabling of his opponent by turn 4. Team Raven Guard is also has won all their games going into round 5. The really tight games look to be Nick Rose and Alex Harrison Possessed Bomb mirror match.

Round 5

Well unfortunately it was bound to happen as the Marine meta took round 4 by storm leaving very few non-marine players undefeated. The big loser of round 4 was Brian Pullen, against a Cent spam list. R0und 5 potentially unfortunately is going to have the non-space marine players get whittled down even more as more are forced face off against each other. An interest matchup to watch is Mani Cheema vs Justin Lois as Justin happens to have a lot of deep strike that can protect himself from being alpha striked, but we shall see!

Well Mani went first and blew James Machenzie out the water again in less than 30min, and took 40 point win. In good news Eulis Sanders is still representing Necrons beating the Chaos Knight player in a very favorable matchup. Jeff Poole is also representing Orks still winning. Other than that it is really an Space Marine/Eldar world.

Round 6

We go into Round 6 with a killer Matchups!

The Top of the list is John Lennon vs. Mani Cheema in the battle of who goes first! As for the rest 11 non Marine armies left who are undefeated out of 27, making things look really grim for anything not Space Marine making the top 8.

Mani Cheema went first…

Ghost Round 7

Turns out you can be completely wrong about something like Mani Cheema losing to John Lennon in a miracle game where John is almost tabled, but plays to the mission and somehow wins. With that we went the Ghost round with starts as Sean Nayden, Brad Chester, and John Lennon get to eat dinner, while the follow pairings is how thing are going to shake down…

https://challonge.com/4ts8yheu?fbclid=IwAR0vkVxD2eX8XNFyJoi2ENOf3uhfLN8mjQ4iSjTOeTxvSUriSjbOFpxHuyo

and follow the games live on this twitch channel!

https://www.twitch.tv/40kstatscentre

Championship Rounds!

So we are finally here the championship rounds! Our worse Space Marine nightmares have come true with 7 of them making it into the Top 8, with surprise Orks along with Eldar and Ad-Mech making it in. My bets are on Sean Nayden winning the whole thing thanks to Mani Cheema implosion against John Lennon, as we do have a good chance of Brohammer finals of Mirror Match boredom of Richard Siegler vs. John Lennon. As for my coverage I am going to mostly let the big boys take over with Warhammer community twitch, Frontline Gaming doing the heavy work. Just follow the links above for details.

I though will report any drama or use Sunday as a picture day for nice armies and great people!

Quarterfinals

Lennon, Siegler, Chester, Nayden move on as 3 out 4 LVO finalist will be Marines.