Tournament Formats 101

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#splatoon3 #tournament #bracket

[gailjoe]

tournament format timecode:
3:39 Round Robin
7:10 and 14:05 Single Elimination
9:54 Double Elimination
15:00 Swiss
20:52 brief summary of the pros and cons

Great video!

[MousaThe]

Thank you for the explanations. I watch some competitive Pokemon people as well as Splat people and the Pokemon guys mention Swiss all the time but I could never figure out what on earth it meant through context clues. Its definitely the common format for Pokemon to start with Swiss and then move to eliminations the next day.

[chelluna]

“Either get up here or stop whining about it” as a pet owner I feel this 😂

[elbowjuiceVODs]

Another tournament video is be interested in is about the thought process that goes into picking a balanced amount of stages/modes and from a competitor POV why they strike or pick what they do

[Onlyitsmereid]

I have a good amount of swiss from my time in the chess scene. The main problems with it were that it could take awhile, as some games would end in 10 minutes and others would take an hour. It also would end up in a lot of ties that would just get broken by math, which isn't exactly exciting.

[cloveruty]

One YouTube chanel I've seen that makes content on racing games like Forza had an interesting type of tournament format for some of their 1v1 races. It starts with a standard Single Elimination bracket, but since they would usually have 12 people playing, there would be 3 people in the quarter finals. In order to get 4 people for the quarter finals, they would do what they called the "Spanner Final", where all previously eliminated players race on the same track at once, winner proceeds to Quarterfinals. While it may not be the best solution for all tournaments, it's a fun little idea to cause extra chaos.

[Pearlsp]

love starting my day with some w
squid school

[LiamWins]

Very upset the thumbnail didn’t contain () vs [] vs {}
(also 2^10 is 1024, not 1028 gem!)

[Larolex]

Excellent video Gem! I’d love to see more videos of you going even more in depth explaining tournament brackets!

[alyssa_vatalth]

That smile and nod at the end was just the cutest!

[FUTAEsports]

This is so good
You just made me understand how these tournament formats work and the best format to implement in organizing tournaments 😊

[ursamajo.r]

I love breakdown of data stuff like this haha, more would be welcome

[Stephen-Fox]

I appreciate the visual puns in the thumbnail.

That is, surely, the roundest of robins.

(Most leagues I'm familiar with are done as a double round robin with everyone playing each other twice, since with a league you no longer have as strict a time constraint on things.)

I think MtG uses Swiss, at least for local events.

Love tournament formats. Always find them fascenating to think about.

But... Let's talk about bridge drives for a second. Because bridge drives are a really weird but kind of cool tournament structure.

Bridge, in case you're unfamiliar (and... Why would you be?), is a card game in which to teams of two (conventionally labelled NS and EW, this will matter later) first bid on how many 'tricks' (a set of four cards being played) they think they can win out of the 13 possible, and then the pair with the highest bid attempts to prove it, gaining points if they do and the opponents gaining points if they fail. The way that scoring works for rubber - how you play it if you're playing a single game of it against one other pair - is a bit more involved, with points going above or below the line, and the game ends when one side scores 100 points ('game') below the line twice - probably winning the game but it's possible the other side got enough points above the line to win anyway - and this is often played for money, but that's irrelevant for drives.

Now, how do you come up with a fair way of determining which of these partners - and a drive might have anywhere from... I think I've seen 8 through 32 tables but I'm sure larger ones exist is the best player in the room, when there's that much chance going on, and even at the same table which side gets dealt the better hands can impact which performs better in the limited time you have to have them play against each other in a single event.

Well, you don't. While Bridge is absolutely a game of skill and across many games in any format the best players are going to win most often, in a Drive format there's far too much luck from hand to hand to control for while also having each pair play against each other a reasonable number of times in an evening. Instead what you do is come up with a way of removing the element of luck. And the answer to that - Duplicate Bridge. Instead of dealing the hands each time, you deal enough hands for every table at the start of the Drive - usually about 3 hands per table - and then (ideally, if you've got time) have each NS pair play against every EW pair, and every pair plays every hand. If you've got an odd number of tables, you achieve this simply by rotating the EW pairs around the tables clockwise and the hands around the tables counter-clockwise, but there are formula and pre-designed formats you can plug in for even numbers of tables, and odd numbers fo couples to get you thinks close to this ideal.

This then gives you results on how every NS pair played every hand, and every EW pair played every hand, and you can normalize the amount of points each pair got on each hand (This is where I get fuzzy on my memories, it's been two decades since I played Bridge). You then add those normalized points up, and get which was the best NS pair on the night, and which was the best EW pair on the night, essentially giving you two distinct tournaments going on at the same event with each pair in each tournament playing against every pair in the _other_ tournament and never against any of the pairs in the tournament they're competing in.

There's also a league way of doing Duplicate Bridge but that's a far more conventional structure, where the duplicate stuff is then plugged into a more conventional league (round robin) structure.

[randomdogdog]

I come from netrunner land. We use Swiss then we cut to double elim. (Though, we have 2 tournament formats, single sided Swiss(SSS), and dual sided Swiss(DSS), but that's fallout from the Async side of things.) While I think our DSS software seeds the second round onwards based on SoS (add up all your opponent's points, divide by rounds played, ) it's not mandatory, and we don't seed the first round.

As such, we've got a hand algorithm to make games (with a pinch of magic for SSS...) The player with the most points plays the next highest player who they haven't played... Simple and straightforward!

I understand that seeding is good, but it feels like that's where most of the negatives on Swiss are coming from...

[dumbdaffodil]

I love that you left the Romeo moment in the video😂😍

[dispenser]

This was super interesting to watch! I don’t have that much experience with competitive splatoon but I compete regularly in debate tournaments through my school, and the sizes of our tournaments can vary wildly from something like 8 people in an event to 100 people in an event. Now I know that when we have a small tournament, we do a round robin style, but what we typically do is a Swiss style with random matchups for the first three preliminary rounds, then it people get paired based on their win/loss record for that day. After that, top 16 or 8 depending on the tournament advance to single elimination. I am very interested in learning how seeding works, so I’m looking forward to that video! (I know this had like nothing to do with splatoon but I just thought it was cool lol)

[niicespiice]

my team played in a tournament, we did about an hour and a half of seeding, and we got knocked out on round one because of the single elimination format... not ideal.

[hellolittlefish]

yesss i would love to learn more about seeding! one of my teammates thinks every tournament should be a ladder after we played FLUTI. I feel like it's probably not the easiest to run bc of so many concurrent matches, but I would love to hear your thoughts.

[NinjarioPicmin]

I don't understand the point when you talk about Swiss and needing many setups, I mean I understand the many setups point, but that applies to any tournament format? Sure while 1v5 and 2v6 play 3, 7, 4, 8 have to wait for them to finish to start their match and then vice versa but for example a double elimination bracket in the same setting could also only have two matches at the same time and the other players waiting for those to finish?

[iprofessornobody]

Thank you so much brother, for explaining in such a good way. please make more videos related to tournaments.