Lol dude I have been organizing tournaments in Edmonton since about 2006. I did run the games room for a while at animethon and then stopped when it just became more of a hassle running the room and I had no way of ever talking to players.
The reason we had to kick people out of the room constantly was because every 5 min I would get a call saying we are close to the fire code, if we have more thn 60 people between the two rooms, it will be shut down.
To my understanding that wasn't true, considering the two rooms capacity was 45 in each room. If this is the year I am remembering, we had BB there and I was unable to speak with everyone about what ever they talked to. But the people I did manage to talk to are in our community even now.
I have my site up and running now and If you need some form of reffrance as to how I organize events in Edmonton I can link you to our Results section so you can see how many people actually show up to each event, or to our flyer part of the site so you can see i'm not fibbing about holding tournaments since such and such date.
When Tom was living in Edmonton I wasn't in a state to get the word out there for GG and had very limited access to even putting flyes in stores, since they would assume I wanted something from them. I have been putting in a considerable amount of work for BB because I have seen GG fail so hard in Edmonton and how frustrating it is to see a community for a good game just fade away for no good reason.
I had a friend of mine hosting online ranking battles and have had starting pots for BB tournaments. I knocked on doors and got BB to be in Canada Cup, I place it in every SF tournament that is hosted. I am not the best player in this game, far from it. But I love the competition that stems from a community atmosphere.
When Tom was here we did do some small house events where ever we could. But they did not go for to long, the small amount of players that did play were getting better (maaaybe) but the fact was, Tom was from Calgary and so was Mike, very few people in Edmonton cared enough the community for that game so nothing came of it.
The final nail in the coffin is when certain individuals said that they would show up for WCC2 and would fight vs Calgary, then never showed up and no one said a single word about GG. I put my efforts into other gaming communities and never herd anything from anyone about GG until we were well into our BB community.
I have no problem what so ever with trying to build on GG as I like the game and Even though I'm trash at it, I would play it regardless.
When I say trash, I mean TRASH
I played the game for about a month and stopped when NO ONE else was playing the game what so ever, not even like 3 people ish.
here is what our level of skilled looked like
Minus TTN who is NOT Edmonton
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Nn0Ss2vsKw
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=esrIDzfMS5M
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7cDUKchlaFs
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GvcQNKrZ2g8
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NO2byLolz74
I gotta kinda laugh at myself for the bad quality in both my game play and the videos with the big black lines hahaha.
Thankfully now I use a HD PVR so the videos come out looking nice and fine.
Oh here is the links for the events I was referring to before.
http://www.edmontongamers.com/tournamentresults.htm
http://www.edmontongamers.com/photos.htm
I'm not posting these to show off, but just to show you that, hey I have been doing events and have communites for games outside of GG and they did grow and they did do well, but no one showed up for GG"
If anything FUCK YEAH lets get GG going in Edmonton, What I can do right now is add it to the current tournament we are doing in Jan and after that just run GG along with every BB tournament we host. Worst case scenario is we get 4-8 people interested and keep the scene for that game going. Best is both GG and BB grow and become larger than SF (Wishful thinking yes..)