Right, while the European WWL has gone away, PlanetRV and myself were really interested in getting something running anyway. This started out life on sirlin.net here and also from the SF2HDR EU XBox Live account.
Now whilst there was a lot of interest, when it came to people actually playing their matches, showing up, and reporting their results, it ran into problems.
But we’re not deterred! 
Taking everything into account, this seems to be the best way to run this going forward for the players that are keen in the EU, and it seems to be going well so far.
:rock:
“fun matches and nice meeting with new players ! High skills and nice people, European HDR Pools are really enjoyable ^^”
I will keep editing these first few posts with up-to-date information, so check back here 
Sign Ups:
To enter European HDR Pool Play you MUST sign up to SRK and make a post in this thread, with your XBL account name. This is only open to European XBox Live players (due to wanting to get decent ping times & waking hours for matches). If you’re in America and are interested in playing something like this, please check out the WWL instead!
Alternatively, if you message me over XBL, then we can do it that way, as long as you report all your matches over XBL too.
Once you’re signed up, we’re going to assume you want to continue playing matches on a fortnightly basis unless you message here, SF2HDR EU or myself that you want to drop, or if you don’t complete any matches for a fortnight and do not respond to XBL messages. If you just want a break for a fortnight (or longer), again, message here, me, or to the HDR EU account. We will have some breaks anyway of course, and hopefully later organise this into ‘seasons’ similar to the WWL, but for now, this is just to get this started.
Pools:
These will be completely randomly assigned into groups of around 4-6 players. We’re still starting small with a bunch of dedicated players but we’ll (hopefully) grow from here. You can see the signed up players listed in the posts below.
Eventually I’d hope to build the pools into some kind of a ladder system… but that would be for a later time right now.
Pool play schedules will be posted here, and possibly on a website later as well.
Event Rules:
You have between the start date and end date of the pool fortnight to meet up and play each of the other players in the pool. Please use XBL messages, SRK forum, this IRC channel (thanks to Shari) or whatever other methods of communication you prefer to get together and play.
I recommend a private 2-player match room on XBL. If you are friends and play matches a lot anyway, make sure to make it clear to each other that it’s a pool match!
All players will also be added to the SF2HDR EU XBox Live account list (if they aren’t already - and assuming they accept!) so you will be able to check there and see who’s online.
Every match is played to the best 2 of 3 games. Each game is best 2 of 3 rounds with standard timing and speed settings etc. All settings must be on default. Akuma (Gouki, Demon) is banned. You can pick any character to play in the first game (ie: the standard HDR blind pick), and you are free to change character between games too if you want to, regardless of whether you win or lose.
Reporting Results:
Once your match is completed, BOTH players must report their results. You must indicate the game scores - so either 2-0 or 2-1 for the best of three games in the match. If you want to report round scores, characters etc, that would be interesting too, but isn’t necessary. Just make sure your results are very clear who won and by what game score!
There are two methods of reporting. Either message SF2HDR EU, or myself over XBL, or leave a message in this thread here. The best way for me is if you can put all your matches for the fortnight into one single post here, and edit it as you play more games (or just post when you’ve played them all).
Results will be collated & reported here, and a new pool will be posted here and begin the Monday evening after a previous fortnight’s pool is completed.
In the event people aren’t able to play, or their are discrepancies and disagreement in the results reported (or not reported), or any other kind of complaint reported, we’ll have to manage that going forward. Players that repeatedly do not manage to get their matches played and reported, or repeatedly disagree over reported results will be dropped.
LAG! If you experience bad lag in your matchup, please report this with your results. If you can get a ping time indication that would also be great, and also if you use any network smoothing setting, let us know what this with your lag report. If you and your opponent both agree, then we will just count the match as a 1-1 draw. However in any other circumstance, please just play the matches anyway despite the lag, but report it. As we hopefully go forward and add more players, we will remove some randomness from the pools in order to keep apart players than experience bad lag between them. However, I am not anticipating this should be a big issue, since we are all in Europe. From the UK I’ve only ever felt a touch of lag with Germany - usually none, and I sometimes get some lag from Greek players I’ve played too.
Points System:
Honestly, this is just for fun & glory right now, so I don’t want to go into working out the details of a scoring system yet. As I mentioned earlier, I personally think the concept of seeded ladder play would be more fun too. But we’ll move more into the possibilities of points systems and ladders etc once we can get this running, hopefully smoothly!
Tiebreaking Rules however, I have already determined:
2 way Tie:
Match Head to head result.
3+ way Tie:
a) Game W/L % within the tied players results against each other only.
b) if still tied: Game W/L % within the whole pool results.
c) if still tied… well, it’s just a tie for now. If we run any one-off tournaments in the future, we’d break up such ties with single round elimination rematches.
I’ll leave Pool