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 a sufficiently unique score. (Sufficiently meaning that a decision can be made for eg prize money).

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)

Example of detailed ordering inside a score category: (other orderings are likely to exist)

  1. descending number of byes: always allocate byes first to maximally distribute byes (to check: maybe there is no need to count byes per player, as a player might mathematically never get more than one bye)
  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)
  • all players keep playing in all rounds
  • players will not meet each other again

Inconveniences

  • players with the same number of victories might not meet each other
  • the end score is no indication of strength
  • 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 (1000+ participants) as an increasing number of rounds is needed to decide on the winner. But Swiss has the same issue.

Notes

  • Judging from the discussions currently, this format is (currently) unsuitable for tournaments
  • This format could be useful in informal demonstrations involving an audience that is not supposed to have any prior ranking: it is a way to concentrate same-strength beginners (if time permits, each round could be decided by eg two winning games).

See also


This is a copy of the living page "Generalised Knockout" at Sensei's Library.
(OC) 2012 the Authors, published under the OpenContent License V1.0.
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