Yeah I was aware of Sega Cup, but unless I'm wrong that's a relatively recent thing right (two years ago?) Does Beat Tribe predate Sega Cup?
Anyway I wonder what kind of characters are represented. Perhaps like Jacky or Taka or high to mid tiers (naturally)? I doubt VF has a problem with characters like some other games might
The character usage isn't skewed heavily towards any one or handful of characters.
There are six pages detailing the full list of teams and players here:
http://beat-tribe.com/contents/teamlist201504291.htmlThat's page one, the links to the others are at the top. As you can see there is a heavy mix of characters and many teams are uniform characters.
As for how old the Beat Tribe Cup is, it took over from the 'Athena Cup' which dates back to 1994!
Here is a brilliant write up on the history of Beat Tribe and Athena Cup, complete with match videos of top matches/finals:
http://virtuafighter.com/threads/vfr-beat-tribe-cup-chronology.19822/As for if it's older than Sega Cup, I'm not entirely sure. I know that in the west it's very recent (2013/2014) but in Japan it's older. I don't imagine it's as old as the grass-roots tournaments for VF2 though.