B-Boy Dyzee at Red Bull BC One Cypher India 2023

Breaking

Discover Dyzee’s OUR system for scoring breaking battles

The B-Boy from Canada explains how he created one of the best scoring systems for breaking through insights into his journey in the dance sport.

Written by Sean Sequeira

8 min readPublished on 22.05.2023 · 14:02 UTC

When Dyzee started breaking in 1993, he was only getting down in local cyphers.

He wasn’t really aware of breaking competitions at that point; there were none around where he lived in Toronto, Canada. At best, he had watched a few videos of battles, but they were just snippets, so it was hard to tell what was going on.

Dyzee conducts a workshop at Red Bull BC One Camp India 2023
© Focus Sports

But more importantly, Dyzee and his crew were finding it difficult to decipher why a particular breaker would win a battle, what was the judging criteria, and on what basis the judges made their decision.

Necessity is the mother of invention, and so it was for Dyzee, through several stages of his journey in breaking.

Building a foundation

Dyzee’s first necessity in 1999 was to help his mother with her banquet hall. Business was slow and she had few bookings, so she asked him for help. “The only thing I knew how to do was break,” says Dyzee, and so he decided to organize his first competition in the banquet hall, bringing in more people and eventually more business. But this also brought on his second necessity, which was to solve an old problem: how do you decide the winner of a breaking battle.

“At that time, there was a lot of beef in breaking. All the dancers were arguing with each other on the most important aspects of breaking. For example, there was one group of people, who said breaking was all about foundation. Our group cared most about originality. Another group valued difficulty above everything else. So, for that first competition I organized, someone said, ‘Hey, how are we gonna judge this fairly?’ And there were a few suggestions at the time,” says Dyzee.

Dyzee performs at a workshop at Red Bull BC One Camp India 2023
© Focus Sports

With this necessity followed invention and Dyzee came up with the answer.

“So then I said, ‘What if we get one person that's very respected for foundation, and that person decides who won based on foundation? And we’ll also have another judge who is respected for their originality, and they're going to decide who was the most original.’ Everyone liked the idea, and that’s how we came up with the scoring system,” adds Dyzee.

Creation through originality

While Dyzee and his crew had come up with the idea that would eventually become the OUR System for scoring breaking battles, it was a long way from its final form.

“Initially someone nicknamed it the Dyzee System. Our crew called it the Back to the Underground System. But it wasn’t fully ready yet and I continued to develop it,” Dyzee says.

Having become an international judge every early on, Dyzee was very well respected around the world. At the same time, he was conducting competitions in his mother’s banquet hall and testing his scoring system there.

“At the time, I was able to have three perspectives: first as a breaker, where I was wondering why I won or lost a particular battle; second as a judge, trying to explain to the participants why I made a particular decision; and third as an organizer, who wanted his events to have transparency for participants and the audience to understand everything,” says Dyzee of his thought process in adapting the scoring system early on.

It wasn’t until 2009 that Dyzee was able to give the scoring system its best shape.

“In 2005, breaking hit its second mainstream media explosion. In particular, it was really popular in Korea, where they were having massive televised breaking battles. I was invited to judge these battles in packed-out stadiums, and I was thinking to myself, ‘What the heck is going on here? Like, this is insane,’” says Dyzee.

He sat with one of the Korean promoters in 2007 to discuss the popularity of breaking, but the promoter was convinced it wouldn’t last long. The reason: while there were massive audiences cheering, they were not really able to connect with the breakers because they just watched for entertainment but were not able to understand the battles.

When Dyzee was invited back to Korea in 2009, he came prepared. Having perfected his scoring system, he held a meeting with the organizers and convinced them to try out the system for a massive event the next year.

The dynamics of scoring

The OUR System for scoring breaking battles was perfected by Dyzee in 2009.

As per the system, every throwdown would be judged on five criteria that were most important in breaking: Foundation, Originality, Dynamics, Execution and Battle.

Each criterion would have a dedicated judge who was highly respected for that aspect of their dance. So Foundation would be judged by someone acclaimed for their foundation as a breaker.

The judge would score the throwdown on a scale of 1 to 5 (with 5 being the highest score). The judge was meant to enter the score electronically immediately after the throwdown, and the scores would be displayed live for the audience while the battle continued.

In the live scoring, it would show which criterion was being won by which breaker or crew. And at the end of the battle, the winner would be the one to have most wins among the five criteria. In case of a tie, the total scores would be added up and the winner decided by the highest points awarded.

“Our perspective is breaking is inclusive, and there should be a category for every type of breaker. So we created a system to treat all criteria equally. And the winner is the person that wins the majority of those criteria. Maybe you win foundation and I win originality, because those are our strongest attributes. But then who's gonna execute better? Who's gonna have better dynamics? And who's gonna have better replies in the battle? That’s what will decide the winner; we have to win those other things to be the better breaker,” Dyzee explains.

Dyzee named it OUR System because it fulfilled his three main targets for a scoring system: Objectivity. Unity. Real time.

After convincing the Korean promoters that it would work, Dyzee gave the system its international debut at the R16 Championships in 2010.

“R16 was the biggest championship in the world at that time. It was the biggest because it was a team country battle held in a 10v10 format. And it was held in a stadium with a full audience. So yeah, it was really exciting,” says Dyzee.

Expanding on the execution

“I was the global tournament producer for R16. While the world finals were held in Korea, there were national finals across the globe, and I worked on all those nationals. So I was implementing the OUR System at every single event, and that’s how the world learnt about the system,” says Dyzee.

While the scale of R16 helped it reach more people, the OUR System also featured at some reputed underground events.

“We've used it at Battle Of The Year; not the world final but the round in Korea. And we've also used it at The Notorious IBE in The Netherlands. We've used at a lot of local rounds of international competitions. But no competition picked it up through and through,” says Dyzee.

Who is winning the battle?

The biggest positive of the OUR System is that it allows the audience to see exactly why a breaker is winning a battle in the middle of throwdowns. In previous scoring systems, judges would deliberate after the battle had ended and award the winner; but no explanation was given about why a particular breaker won.

“One of the big benefits of the system is that it educates the audience. That's a very important point. Audience members can look up at the screen and see who's winning or losing each throwdown. But they will also see that scoring is based on criteria and then maybe they will ask, ‘Okay, what is foundation? What is originality?’ And that becomes really important for a mainstream audience to have a window into the world of breaking. It helps them actually read the battle and know what's going on. That was always huge for me and why I created the OUR System. It is also what I feel is lacking in the scoring system that will be used at the Olympics,” says Dyzee.

There was once hope that the OUR System would be utilized when breaking makes its debut at the Olympics in Paris 2024. But while Dyzee was initially part of the team assembled to create the scoring system for the multi-sport tournament, he was dropped from the team and they decided to adopt a very different scoring system that hasn’t been fool proof so far.

“I understand that for an organizer, it is easier to just bring in some of our friends, some respected breakers to come and judge. They don’t really want to have to bother about giving scores to dancers, explain why someone won a round, make it easy for the audience to connect. But with a professional system, you need to train people how to judge according to categories. You need it to be properly set up so it is fool-proof, so there are no questions later on why someone won. And right now, with the system being talked about for the Olympics, they are having these problems where no explanations are given for judging. It makes me laugh, because I keep thinking, ‘We went through the exact same thing, you know?’ That’s what we worked through to create the OUR System. But for the good of everyone, I hope they can figure it out,” Dyzee concludes.