CigarMadness 2016
Cigar Madness 2016 has two distinct sides.
The first, referred to as tier 1, is a traditional bracket sheet contest for the NCAA Mens Basketball Tournament. 
This portion of our contest will be open to the public and hosted by Yahoo Sports. This host allows for a private bracket, which allows us to use a non-public web address. This benefits us by requiring entrants to enter the site from our portal, that allows us to promote the activities of CigarMayven.com and its sponsors. Given the popularity of this event we expect to increase our Twitter follower count to over 50,000 during the contest. Every one of those entrants will see information about our sponsors, including links as desired.
We will be using the Yahoo points system of scoring which insures more contestants will have the ability to remain in prize contention longer, garnering more interest and page views.
The second tier is a closed competition in the same format as the basketball tournament. Rather than basketball teams the competitors will be cigars. We will start with 64-68 cigars and our team of reviewers will match them off one against an other in blind pairings. From these 32 we will have eliminated half of the field (just like the basketball). The second round will similarly pair off the remaining contestants. As the competition draws to the Sweet 16 the number of reviews per cigar will increase. With each round the pairings and winners will be updated on the website, which must be seen as the gateway to the public contest results. Each round of cigars winners will be posted before the completion of the same basketball round. We expect in excess of 100,000 page views per round. The cigar competition will continue successively decreasing the remaining competitors until we have an Elite 8, Final 4 and Final smoke off. As the cigar competition goes into the deeper rounds even more reviewers will be smoking each cigar to insure a more unbiased result. All cigar tasting will be blind as we have a non-reviewer taking off all of the bands and replacing them with a number, once again, insuring a non-biased review.
How Can I Participate?
There are two ways: first you may enter cigars, up to a maximum of three in the cigar tier of the event. In order to do so, you need to submit a completed entry form for each cigar and provide a minimum of 22 sticks. They do not have to be in boxes, reducing your expense. All entrants will receive a listing on our gateway page. This can be a web link if you wish, or can include a phone number. Each cigar entered will be given a very brief review. If you wish a more in depth review, please feel free to contact us for more information.
The second method for participation is to provide a prize for the basketball tier. These prizes may be any cigar-related merchandise or cigars themselves. Every prize donor will be listed on the gateway page. This listing can be a logo with a link to any page you wish. Once again, we expect over 100,000 page views per round.
For those considering entering a cigar, entries are due by October 1, 2015 and cigars must be received by November 1, 2015. This will allow us to complete the process and have the cigar results posted simultaneously with the basketball results.
