Winter Cup, Extra - Regolamento

The Winter Cup, the National High School Basketball Championship Tournament, is a tournament that takes place during the winter and is held at the Tokyo Metropolitan Gymnasium. It is a tournament for high school basketball teams. Before the actual Winter Cup, preliminaries are held in each prefecture. Only 2 teams can represent a prefecture. Only the top 8 teams from the Interhigh can participate in the Winter Cup preliminaries.
This year, because of a memorial anniversary, there will be more schools participating than normal. Also, the winner and runner-up of the Interhigh (Rakuzan High and Tōō Academy) are automatically placed.

The Winter Cup preliminaries begin November 7. At the preliminaries, there will first be a "best of four" determination match and the winning teams advance to the final league. Those four teams compete in three league matches and the top two teams get a ticket for the actual Winter Cup.
The Winter Cup itself is in classic tournament structure, a single-elimination tournament, also known as sudden death. It will begin with 2 basic rounds, the eight-, quarter- and semi-finals and eventually the finals.

Together with the Interhigh Tournament and the Nationals, it makes up the three big high school basketball tournaments.