Generalised Knockout

    Keywords: Tournament

In this tournament format, players compete for the top half of the places they still can reach in that round; losers end up in the bottom half, and the process repeats inside each half until each player has as individual score.

Table of contents

Procedure

  1. all players start with a score of 0
  2. for each round
    1. pair equal scored players
    2. at the end of the round, double each player's current score, then add 1 point to the score of winners, jigo (if decided so) and byes
    3. repeat until enough players have a unique score so that 2nd, 3rd, ... places are known, as far as desired

Pairing

  • slide or fold pairing is recommended otherwise chances are the second best player will end up in the bottom half after e.g. the first round.
  • Bye are given to the strongest player (the one most likely to go to te next round)

Detailed ordering inside a score category:

  1. descending number of byes: always allocate byes first to maximally distribute byes
  2. ascending strength
  3. in case of odd number of players, last player in this list gets a bye.
  4. Then proceed with slide pairing

Note that there can still be tiebreak issues here: who's to get the bye? See /bye discussion

Advantages

  • easy (an Excel sheet should suffice, but paper and pen will do fine)
  • can also determine 2nd, 3rd, 4th... etc. place; if desired, much more players keep playing in all rounds

Inconveniences

  • players with the same number of victories might not meet each other
  • an early loss counts heavily (this is a key property of this system); a lucky win places a player relatively high in the end result. This effect could be reduced by increasing the number of games to decide a round. If you want to avoid this disadvantage, use double (or triple) knockout, or use Swiss.
  • less suited for large tournaments as an increasing number of rounds is needed to decide on the winner

See also

Page WME's from contributions of willemien,Herman,axd


This is a copy of the living page "Generalised Knockout" at Sensei's Library.
(OC) 2009 the Authors, published under the OpenContent License V1.0.
[Welcome to Sensei's Library!]
StartingPoints
ReferenceSection
About