Bar Madness
In honor of the NCAA March Madness tournament, we created and hosted our very own Bar Madness bracket, where Charlestonians can vote in head-to-head matchups to see which bar Charleston crowns king.
It was very hard to narrow down the hundreds of incredible bars and restaurants here to a 64 team bracket, so we apologize to all the great bars that were left out. Next year, perhaps we’ll do a handful of brackets to include more than 64.
Our followers voted to separate the bracket quadrants by 4 types of bars instead of by geographic regions, and it was a great choice. We chose to break it down by Dive Bars & Pubs, Sports Bars, Cocktail Bars & Nightclubs, and Restaurants. We sorted bars into these categories in a way that would make the bracket most competitive. For example, in the Sports Bar category, Dispensary and Bay Street Biergarten could go under a few categories, but they’re both great places to watch sports so putting them there made that group more competitive. Similarly under Restaurants, Red’s and Vickery’s (+ Muddy’s) could also be dive bars, but there were more dive bars we wanted to include so putting them here let us make both groups better.
For seeding each bar, we did the best we could to rank them based on reputation, popularity, fan base, and overall experience. This part we just tried our best but it ended up resulting in some incredible match ups.
Let’s take a look at the results:
Round of 64
The first round largely went to the favorites of each match up but there were some big upsets.
Gene’s barely snuck past Tin Roof.
Windjammer and Chico Feo miraculously tied, with Windjammer winning the follow-up tie-breaker vote.
Big Gun upset Bangkok by just 2% of the vote.
Prohibition upset Stars by a huge amount.
Felix absolutely crushed Republic.
The Gin Joint beat Bourbon N’ Bubbles.
Container Bar handily beat Fuel Cantina.
The biggest upset of the round was Vickery’s (15) smoked their neighbor NICO 63% to 37%.
Round of 32
Windjammer upset Rec Room by a surprising margin.
Burns Alley easily handled A.C.s which we thought would be closer.
Commodore crushed Cocktail Club to continue their momentum.
Dispensary vs Bay Street Biergarten turned out to be a friendly rivalry between management and employees (we loved it), but Dispensary won by a comfortable lead.
Tattooed Moose had an incredible upset over 1-seed 167 Raw by literally 1 vote!
Obstinate Daughter smoked Red Drum (we were surprised).
We thought Reds vs. Saltwater Cowboys would be an intense Shem Creek match up, but Red’s blew them away 74 to 26%.
Sweet 16
In one of the most shocking upsets of the tournament, Commodore stunned everyone with a win over 1-seed Henry’s by just 5 votes in the last hour of voting!
Container Bar blew past Obstinate Daughter in a shock upset to continue their streak.
Elite 8
Blind Tiger took out one of the remaining 1-seeds, also with a 55-45 win over Royal American (this one was controversial for a lot of you).
Commodore’s Cinderella story finally came to an end with a 55-45 loss to Uptown.
Dispensary finished the last remaining 1-seed with a 53-47 upset over Home Team.
Red’s ended Container Bar’s miraculous run as a 10-seed with a whopping 65-35 victory.
Final 4
The battle of the 2-seeds was close, but Blind Tiger pulled away toward the end to finish 54-44 against Dispensary.
Uptown beat Red’s by just 1 percent of the vote (11 votes) in a stunning showdown.
Final
Based on the amount of votes Blind Tiger was winning by throughout the tourny and the mass support from fans, we would have said it was their tournament to lose. The lead went back and forth throughout the day with some major accounts reposting and rallying votes on each side. But in the last few hours, Uptown pulled away to secure a 55-45 victory over Blind Tiger. Incredible.
It was an amazing game for us to host and we’re super excited with how many people and bars got really into it. The vote counts on each ‘game’ increased almost tenfold from the start of the bracket to the final round. We’re super excited to bring this back bigger and better next year. Hopefully we can get an even bigger section of Charleston’s bar goers in the voting and see which upsets happen then. Stay tuned and follow our Instagram for more fun games, trivia and contests about Charleston’s bar scene!
