Tournament Formats

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Revision as of 05:52, 27 August 2020 by Shtkn (talk | contribs)

There are a few common tournament bracket formats, we will briefly go over them here.

Single Eimination

Single Elimination is a simple format where once a player loses, they are eliminated from the tournament. This format is popular for team competitions and informal tournaments since it is very fast to run.

The basic flow is:

  • All players are assigned a person to face
  • Players who win advance and face other players who win. Players who lose are eliminated from the tournament
  • Repeat until a single player remains

Double Elimination

Double Elimination is a format where a player must lose twice to get eliminated from the tournament. This is a popular format for 1v1 competitions because it determines top 4 without having any tiebreaker rounds, and everyone has a second chance to play more tournament matches.

There are two brackets: Winners Bracket and Losers Bracket.

The basic flow is:

  • All players start in Winners Bracket, like in a Single Elminiation bracket
  • Players who lose in Winners Bracket get placed in Losers Bracket
    • Where they get placed in Losers Bracket depends on how many matches they won in Winners Bracket
  • Players who lose in Losers Bracket are eliminated
  • The two final players (the winner of Winners Bracket and the winner of Losers Bracket) compete in Grand Finals.
    • In Grand Finals, the player from Losers Bracket must win twice since the player from Winners Bracket needs to lose twice to be elimimated from the tournament.


Pools

For larger tournaments (like most majors), it makes sense to split the players up into groups of players called pools. Each pool works like a smaller double elimination bracket, except the top 1-4 players advance to the next stage. The players that advance will fill up a double elimination bracket. Players stay in the same bracket when advanced from pools (ex: advancing from pools Losers Bracket means you will be in Losers Bracket in the next stage). The number of players that advance is dependant on the tournament and can vary from 1 to 4 players.

Seeding

Seeding is the act of deciding player's starting positions in a bracket.

There are two common types of seeding:

Skill Seeding
The goal here is to spread the higher skilled players (as decided by the some sort of ranking system) as far apart in the bracket as possible. This serves two purposes:
  1. "Save" higher tier players meeting up for later in the tournament in order to conceptrate spectator attention to matches expected to be exciting to watch.
  2. If an upset happens (a low ranked player defeats a high ranked player), then they will not have to face a high ranked player for a while instead of possibly immediately facing another.
Region Seeding
The goal with regional seeding is to spread players apart based on where they live in order to prevent players from the same region (and presumably often player each other) from meeting early in the bracket.

Round Robin

Round Robin is simple; everyone faces everyone else. The winner is determined by who won the most matches. This format is used when there is a small amount of players since the amount of matches to run tournaments in this format grows explosively.