Setting max clients to one makes it impossible to have free space. Anyone who wants to join could happen to make the tourney have problems then. It has no minimization on on the likelihood of server crashes. When someone tries to join, they have to get the message that there is too many people in the server and I am fairly sure some connection process is happening there. I could be stupid wrong on that, but I doubt it. I believe server crashes happen the most due to people trying to connect to a max server, but I could still be stupid wrong about that too, however I still doubt it.

Users will not have leniency to join and watch once the tourney starts for a period of time if max clients are set to 1, in which case when max clients could be readded, the vip all thing would be practically useless then.

Giving everyone whos participating in the tourney a free VIP pass is a good idea imo as long as the cons can be overcome. Basically, it could cause even more crashes and issues that it's supposed to prevent at times. Of course, it could work a lot of the time, but I don't know if this could be worth the occasional disconnect and inability to rejoin upon one's turn.