Now For Your Favorite Maine Bar In Of Cyys Bar Ch Madness: How Voting Works & How to Win

Who votes in CYY's Bar-ch Madness and why the station runs it

CYY's Bar-ch Madness is the bar tournament 94.3 WCYY runs for its Maine audience, and the people who vote in it are the station's own listeners: rock fans, bar regulars and neighborhood crowds who already argue about where to drink. The vote lives at wcyy.com, the broadcaster's own web address, and the page that carries the ballot carries the station's full masthead, navigation and promotions around it.

The bracket's shape is what gives the vote its community pull. Rather than naming a single winner from a long list, the tournament whittles the field round by round. By the 2024 round 3 ballot the field had narrowed to the last four bars, and the page framed the choice geographically: readers were asked to weigh in on the Portland and non-Portland bar scene alike. That split matters in a state where the scene is not concentrated in a single city, because a bar outside Portland can take the bracket on the strength of its own local following.

For the bars, the vote is audience-facing rather than juried. Nobody fills in an entry form and no panel scores the drinks; a bar advances when its people show up and click. That makes the tournament a proxy for loyalty, and it explains why the station promotes each round on air as it opens. The table below gathers these points in one place.

The dated run of the tournament, from 2019 to 2026

The confirmed edition years are 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2024, 2025 and 2026. That list is the whole published history: seven spring runs with no entry held for 2023, a gap the station has not explained anywhere on its own pages. Read as a pattern, the tournament is an annual fixture that has survived a lineup change or two and kept its name and its home at wcyy.com throughout.

The 2024 round 3 page is the best-dated evidence for how the season falls. That ballot closed Sunday, March 24th at 11:59pm, and the text told readers the final matchup would be unveiled Friday, April 5th at noon, with voting extending beyond the announcement. Round 3 landing in late March puts the earlier rounds earlier in the month and the championship in the first week of April, an April cycle that fits the station's spring programming.

What the station does not publish is a standing schedule or a rule sheet. No page names the earlier round dates for a coming year, and none sets out vote limits or eligibility terms alongside the bracket; whether any such terms apply, confirm on the live ballot each cycle. The practical reading for a supporter is that the ballot page itself is the calendar: when a round opens, the station posts it, promotes it on air, and closes it on the date printed at the top of that round's page.

How a supporter casts a vote on the live ballot

The voting act is built for speed, because the station wants drive-time listeners to respond to a mention they heard minutes earlier. A supporter opens the current round's page at wcyy.com, sees the bars still standing in the bracket, and picks a favorite. In the 2024 round 3 ballot that meant choosing from the last four bars, with the field presented across the Portland and non-Portland scenes so no reader had to hunt for their side of the state.

There is no account wall and no payment step in the published flow. The pick is made on the page and submitted there, and the result feeds the station's tally directly. Because each round's headline becomes its own web address on the broadcaster's domain, the reliable path to the live vote is the link the station pushes on air, on its homepage and through its app and social channels.

Two things matter for anyone voting this way. First, the page is where the dates live: the closing time for the current round, and any announcement of the next one, are printed on that round's own page, as the March 24th close and the April 5th noon unveiling were in 2024. Second, the station has printed no terms about how often a person may vote or whether repeat visits count; supporters who want to vote in every round should follow each new page as the station posts it rather than assuming any standing rule.

Where this ballot sits among Maine's best-of votes

Maine has a crowded field of public best-of ballots, and CYY's Bar-ch Madness stands apart from the reader-survey model that dominates the state. Programs like Best of the 207, Best of Maine and the Kennebec Journal Readers' Choice publish wide category rosters once a year and let readers write in across dozens of fields. The station's bracket does the opposite: it narrows a single vertical, bars, round by round, which is why the Mainebiz Readers' Choice crowd and the tournament crowd barely overlap even though both hunt the same state's loyalties.

The same contrast holds against the specialist ballots. The Maine Restaurant Week Diners' Choice runs around a dining event, and the Maine Parade of Homes People's Choice attaches its vote to a home tour. None of them put bars head to head in a knockout draw. What the radio tournament offers a bar is momentum, the sense of a live contest that advances week to week in spring, rather than a category line in a annual magazine.

For a business deciding where its audience actually is, the choice is between the broad surveys and this bracket, and a bar with a devoted Portland or non-Portland following has an argument for both. The station's version rewards a concentrated push during the April window; the surveys reward year-round name recognition across the state.

Strengthening support for a bar during the bracket

Because the vote rides on the station's audience, the strongest campaigns are the ones that make the ballot easy to reach. A bar still standing in a round can tell regulars the exact page, post the matchup on its own channels, and time the reminder before the printed close, which in 2024 fell at 11:59pm on Sunday, March 24th. The bracket's round structure means a push has a clear deadline, and the last four stage gives a bar a story to tell: win here and the final matchup lands Friday, April 5th at noon.

The station publishes no rule text about outside help, which cuts both ways: nothing on the page licenses aggressive tactics, and nothing forbids ordinary promotion. Support that arrives as real audience attention is the kind this format was built to measure. Readers weighing a wider push can compare notes in the votes guide, and anyone considering a purchase should read the pricing and legality pages first rather than assume the station's tolerance.