In order to hold the Stamford Pizza Tournament in a single day, we need to balance some of our priorities so that it's both feasible and relatively fair. Obviously, we'll be paring down our list of 50+ pizzerias to something a bit more manageable given our time constraint. Eight seems like a good number, weeding out all but the top 15% or so, so we're sticking with it.

As we've mentioned in our illuminating piece on scoring the Pizza Tour, there are two ways to look at what a "good" pizza is. As not to weigh one over the other, we've taken care to analyze the top ten Pizza scores as well as the top ten eleven Hits the Spot scores to single out some of the top dogs. Incidentally, this is a lot easier said than done.

To begin, both Amore and Hope Pizza have excellent standings (top five or better) on both lists (top Pizza and Hits the Spot scores), so we're going to include them in the Tournament, no questions asked. Good? Good.

Next, we have pizzerias that still appear in both top ten lists, but only crack the top 5 in one of them. These are Ridgeway (top five Pizza) and John the Baker (top five Hits the Spot). While these guys' all-around numbers aren't as good as the latter two, there still pretty damn respectable, so they're in too.

This leaves us with four more empty spots to fill and as many as ten deserving restaurants to fill them with. Of these ten pizzerias, three bring up the tail end of both lists (Springdale, Stamford Pizzeria, Outpost), three appear only as top ten Pizza scores (Remo's, Sorrento, Pellicci's), three appear only as top ten Hits the Spot scores (John's, Sergio's, Michael's), and one would utterly piss people off if we didn't include it (Colony). As you can imagine, this also leaves us with some difficult decisions to make.

Or does it?


That's right, loyal readers, it's time for you to chime in. Considering we've pretty much dictated this whole operation from the get-go, we're going to go ahead and relinquish control on these last four picks. The above poll will be open until next Monday Saturday at 5 pm, accessible on the Pizza Tour website as well as here, and will take multiple answers at once. The top four vote-getters will be the final entrants in the Stamford Pizza Tournament. Have at it.

(Also, if you're one of our 9 feed subscribers, you'll probably have to visit the site to vote.)