Pools Only format - works and is faster than double elimination bracket

Pools Only can be faster than a Pools - > Double Elimination bracket.

"No it isn't!" you say, and mathematically you're correct.

However

You're not taking into account for the fact that you are probably a mediocre TO at best and most of your players are more concerned with playing friendlies and getting food and smoking and talking and disappearing right when you need them instead of finishing the tournament.


I just finished running a Brawl Pools-Only tournament using the FC ruleset (Norfair legal! :D). There were 31 entrants; we had 7 TVs (halfway through pools round two we had an 8th, but it only played two non-friendly sets on it).

We started at 12:30 p.m., finished doubles bracket (9 teams) at 2:30 p.m., and finished the final round of pools at 8:30 p.m.

81 sets in Round 1 Pools, then 30 sets in round 2 Pools, then 15 sets in the Final round of Pools for a grand total 126 sets in Six hours (average of 21 sets an hour with 7 setups)

You'll note this is far more sets than a standard double elimination bracket, but the fact of the matter is that with strict instructions you can make pools more efficient than bracket. Nearly everyone gets WAY more games, characters like Fox are no longer destroyed by the one guy who hard counters them, no one gets a "lucky bracket". It's awesome.

How to do a Pools Only tournament Overswarm style: Also known as "imagine everyone is stupid"

Rule #1 - No one players more than one set in a row (normally)

Strict instructions to NOT play more than one set in a row unless no one else can play a match. If someone says "I want to finish all my matches", DQ them and put their head on a pike for all to see. Give them no refund.

Theoretically it is perfectly fine to play two sets in a row in almost every circumstance. The problem is that no one checks to see if it causes a bottleneck. Having ONE match and then you get up win or lose not only prevents any bottleneck that wouldn't occur naturally, it ALSO means that everyone constantly has a match going. No one gets up to "go get food".

Rule #2 - Be less lenient early on to prevent traffic jams

Food comes when it is most convenient for the player. As the tournament goes on, you should be more lenient with the players remaining since they have had less time to eat. Ditto goes for bathroom breaks, smoke breaks, or whatever else.

That means if round 1 pools is starting and the person asking you "can I go get food" wasn't in double finals the answer is no. When one guy asks if he can go get food because he "wasn't hungry" when he was knocked out of doubles or he just finished his first pools set and now wants to eat before he plays again, he is being selfish. Treat it accordingly. If he was in doubles and wasn't in WF, LF, or GF, he had time to eat. If he wasn't in doubles, he had PLENTY of time to eat. A lack of preparation on their part in the form of "let's play friendlies to warm up before the tournament starts" is a choice.

Your answer is almost always going to be "No, wait until you are done with your pool".

People have to eat. But earlier on more people will be associating with that individual in the tournament format. Preventing them from slowing that exchange down let's you make round 2 pools faster.

A basic rule of thumb is that no one eats except after Round 1 of Pools unless they earned the right by making it really far in doubles.

Rule #3 - Singles starts before Doubles ends

If you are playing doubles finals 2 out of 3, you get a possibility of 24 minutes to the set. If you are doing 3 out of 5, you are up to 40 minutes to the entire set. Half of that being 12 or 20 minutes, which is still way too long to let people just do whatever they want.

The moment Loser's Finals end, you call out Pools and stop any and all friendlies. If they do not immediately stop their friendly, DQ them. This will make your tournament run faster and no one will play friendlies when you tell them not to ever again. It is also funny to DQ people that are playing friendlies because often they feel the need to do so to do better in singles.


Rule #4 - Get there attention, and then tell them what they need to know before what they want to know

I personally made everyone pay attention by doing a raffle for drivers and people who brought a wii / TV regardless of it was used. I got a lot of little prizes (bead art, metal puzzles, stickers, gumball machine toys, etc.) and a few cool prizes (awesome bead art, $5 toward something in the store, $10 toward something in the store), and everyone got into it. It was no longer a bore for them.

After getting their attention and being able to plainly see what stations were free, I called out where doubles finals was going to be, and then called out the TVs for singles pools, the basic rules for pools and how many advanced, and then called out the people in each pool.

Notice the part where I said what pool people were in last. This gives people time to stop what they are doing and come up and makes sure they listen to everything else. This prevents "what pool was I in" shenanigans.

Rule #5 - Don't micromanage pools

Have you ever noticed that most of the time you have a tournament, the same people get to the top?

Have you also noticed that most of the time those people were seeded as such? Even in pools, which is supposed to determine seed?

Because we come in knowing a basic skill levle of everyone invovled, we generally pre-seed the tournament by putting one or two people in pools that we "think" will get 1st and 2nd and then, lo and behold, they get 1st and 2nd.

That is bracket manipulation and it wastes a ton of time.

In a pools only format, you don't really have to worry about that!

Pick the top X people, where X is the number of pools you have, and then separate those people. Everyone else separate by location alone. You now have a pool that is lightly seeded. It takes about 30 seconds, no guesswork, and doesn't screw other people over.

AFTER the first round of pools never under any circumstances switch people in pools unless it is to make players not play people they played in the previous round of pools. That is IT.

The seeds people get from Round 1 Pools will bring them to Pools R2, and you do NOT need to micromanage this any further. If Tio decides to make the 2/3rds of the people from Pool 1 of Round 1 join together in Pool 1 of Round 2 then sure, move that around.

But if you see two "good" people in the same pool and it turns out one got a 1 seed and the other got a 2? DO NOT TOUCH IT. If you do, you're cheating and wasting time.

If you say "Oh, these two people play together all the time", DO NOT MOVE THEM. This is just a bad luck story. If they complain, tell them to ask for a better random result last time. Moving people around based on location past Round 2 is rigging the bracket.

To reiterate:

Round 1 pools - separate by location, and put one "star" player in each pool using TOs discretion and no more; the rest are placed in pools by location only.

Round 2 pools - separate only by seed from previous pool and preventing mimicked pools from last round (don't let 100% move over, and if you have a way to make everyone play new people do so)

Any further round should be done the same as round 2.

This saves time, makes the tournament FAIR, and is AWESOME.

Rule # 6 - Get setups however you can

Reward people for bringing setups. This is common sense, but you need setups to run a tournament. The more the better.

Rule # 7- The Important One: Do Pools RIGHT.


The basic rule of thumb for pools is this: You want to have more pools with less players for a faster tournament.

If you have 5 pools of 4 (4+3+2+1*5 matches), they will run faster than 4 pools of 5 (5+4+3+2+1*4), setups willing. There's some math junk in there if the setups aren't optimal, but all in all you want more pools with less players.

That's just a rule of thumb though, not necessarily what is best for the tournament. Just remember if you're running low on time, that's what you want. I generally want MORE MATCHES for my players because I'm an awesome TO and that's what people deserve. More matches. So that's the one thing I tend to do inefficiently and will continue to do so if possible.


A basic rule of thumb for a tournament that is doing Pools only is to limit the tournament to THREE ITERATIONS of Pools. Just three. It's tempting to do more, but look at this example (please note I'm kind of picking numbers at random here)

Let's say there's 20 people. We want to do 3 rounds of pools, and are paying top 4.

Let's do 5 pools of 4 and say top 2 get out to cut our player list in half.

We then have 10 players left. We want to cut this in half again.

We have two pools of 5, top 2 get out.

We then have 4 players left.

We have one pool of 4, and you pay out to those 4 players.

That's a total of (4+3+2+1*5) + (5+4+3+2+1*2) + (4+3+2+1) = 90 sets.

If we fell into the trap of "Wow, only top 2 get out? That's brutal man.... why not do more iterations of pools?" We would get this:

20 players, want to do 4 rounds of pools, paying top 4.

Let's do 5 pools of 4, top 3 get out.

We have 15 players left.

We have 3 pools of 5, top 3 get out.

We have 9 players left.

We have two pools of 4 (one extra tacked on to a pool), top 2 get out.

We have 4 players left, they play for their placements.

That's a total of (4+3+2+1*5) + (5+4+3+2+1*3) + (4+3+2+1*2) + (4+3+2+1) = 125 sets.

Streeeeeeeetching that small amount of players makes your TWENTY man tournament have the same amount of sets as my THIRTY man tournament (31 players, 126 sets). That's the time difference between doing three iterations and being brutal and doing four iterations and saying "top 3 get out instead of top 2 in this round instead".

Do you have time? If so, then great. I personally wouldn't plan on having the time.



So how do you determine how the numbers are SUPPOSED to work? How many pools do I have and how many advance?

That varies depending on the amount of entrants, but some basic rules are:

1) You want to cut your player list in half around R1 pools
2) You want to end with only the amount of players you will be paying


It might seem draconian to kill out half of your entrants after round 1 pools, but think of it this way:

The people not advancing from R1 pools would go 0-2 in bracket against people they couldn't hold a candle to in 90% of the tournaments. They aren't really "getting more matches" this way.

The people that are advancing from R1 pools now automatically get to play an additional 4 or 5 sets instead of a minimum of two! It always bugged me that the "up and coming" players were judged as to whether or not they beat a behemoth in bracket. I got 1st seed in the majority of tournaments I entered and I can only remember one time a 4th seed was trouble for me. It was a wasted match for both me and him. However, I do remember lots of people barely getting out of pools into a 32 man bracket and then having to play the people that would make top 5. Sucks for them, not good for the community.

So anyway, I'll use my tournament as an example with 31 people.

I want to cut it in half, so I want 15 people assuming I can easily cut this down to the amount of slots I'm paying out to (top 6).

5 pools of 6 (one of 7)- top 3 advance
3 pools of 5 - top 2 advance
1 pool of 6 - play for placements

See how clean that is? 5-3-1. 6-5-6. People get a lot of matches and the pool number shrinks by the same amount. Those are clean numbers.


What if you have 24 people?

(24) 4 pools of 6 - top 3 advance (notice this cuts your players by half; basic math here)
(12) 3 pools of 4 - top 2 advance
(6) 1 pool of 6 - play for placement

Clean.


What about a weird number, like 37?

You want to cut it in half (18)

6 pools of 6 (one of 7)- top 3 advance (notice that the number that advances if half the number of pools; this will always be the case to cut in half)

18 left

3 pools of 6 - top 2 advance

6 left

1 pool of 6 - player for placements



It's easy. Just sit down and pick random numbers and try to make it work. If you follow the rules of "Okay, first round I want to cut in half. Second round I want to cut until I can have one pool for placements" then it becomes a cinch.


What if you have like a gajillion people? Let's say 66 people show up to your event. You watn to cut in half (33)

At this point you will probably need an additional round of pools or be super draconian. What you want to do is your choice, but know that either work.

Let's stick to 3 rounds, top 6 get paid, and do some experimentation so you understand these situations that can occur.

66 players

11 pools of 6 - top 3 advance

Paying attention? How many setups do you need for optimum efficiency? It's the # of players divided by 2 (since it takes 2 players to play a set); in this case, optimum efficiency is 66/2 = 33 TVs.

Keep in mind, I had 31 players so that'd be 15 TVs and I had half of that and still got done quickly.

Why? Because I cut my player base in half and thus cut the TVs I needed in half. 15 TVs is optimum for R1 but I had 7. OPTIMUM FOR ROUND 2, followed up by needing only 3 TVs for the remaining 6 players.

So, down to 33 players after the 11 pools of 6.

Now if we want to cut that down to SIX players out of 33, we'd need to do:

6 pools with top 1 advance
3 pools with top 2 advance
2 pools with top 3 advance
1 pool with top 6 advance

Notice multiplying those numbers all = 6. When you want a certain number of players, the number that advances multiplied by the number of pools = the number of players you will have.

So we can have 6 pools of 5 with some change with top 1 advance
or 3 pools of 11 with top 2 advance
or 2 pools of 16 with top 3 advance
or 1 pool of 33 with top 6 advance

None of these are possible except for the 6 pools of 5; even the 3 pools of 11 is way, way too many.

Is "top one advances" fair to the player?

Not really.

So, we must do ANOTHER ROUND.



When dealing with LARGE amounts of players, you must be draconian or have another round of pools.


33 players, let's cut it in half again (16)

Since we want 16, our # of pools multiplied by # of players advancing must = 16, and since we have 33 players our # of pools * number of players in a pool must = 33. Get it? Just ignore the "change" leftover of oddball players; I'm working with 32 here since I'll just have one guy added to a random pool. Remember these forumulas!

So our options are:

16 pools of 2 , top 1 advance

8 pools of 4, top 2 advance

4 pools of 8, top 4 advance

2 pools of 16, top 8 advance

The optimal pool selection here depends totally on your scenario. How much time do you have, how many setups, your personal philosophy, and how many "1" seeds from the previous iteration of pools did you have. We had 11 pools of 6 before for our 66 man tournament, so we have 11 total 1 seeds.

That means if we did 16 pools of 2, we'd have the unfortunate event of 5/16 of those pools not having a one seed and thus those other 11 pools having a MUCH harder time for the non-1 seed.

That leaves with 8 pools of 4 top 2 advance, but that kind of gives us the same problem. Do we consider it acceptable to have 8 pools with top 2 advance, but 11 First seeds, meaning 3/8ths of the pools will have TWO one seeds in a "top two advance" scenario?

This all depends on how draconian you are. Personally, with 33 players left, I'd want to be less draconian except in case of emergency.

So I, personally, choose 4 pools of 8 with top 4 advance. This is NOT the most efficient choice, but this means that the 11 seeds are split up like this:

Pool 1 - 3 one seeds
Pool 2 - 3 one seeds
Pool 3 - 3 one seeds
Pool 4 - 2 one seeds

Unfortunately the most efficient and the most fun or fair aren't always the same. In this case, the amount of players and the amount of pools we used previously put us in a corner and we had to choose to be super draconian or make the pools have EIGHT players. Eight players is a HUGE pool (8+7+6+5+4+3+2+1 = 36 * 4 pools = 144 sets), so you might not even have time for it. If you don't have time, you don't have time.

So we cut it down to 16 players after round 2 with 4 pools of 8, top 4 advance. 4*4 = 16.

Now with 16 and top 6 get paid, we want to now lower it to 6 players.

How can we do that?

2 pools of 8 - top 3 advance
1 pool of 16 - top 6 advance

Ouch.

What about:

3 pools of 5 (one of 6) - top 2 advance


Ta da! Fudged the numbers a bit, worked out great. We drastically reduced our set count by imagining we had one less player and then just sticking the extra somewhere.

Final round we have 6 players.


Now you don't HAVE to cut down to the last few players. With 16 left you can cut down to a pool of 8 in a plethora of ways, I just find it is most efficient to have a final round where everyone there gets paid.




FINAL RULE - Never, under any circumstances, tell the pool format (# of pools, players, advancers) before that round starts.

That means you aren't telling people how many iterations of pools you're doing for sure, how many pools there will be, how many players in each pool, none of that.

Know why?

Because you might have 10 hours to finish what you expect to be a 20 man tournament that turns into a 40 man tournament, or the guy bringing 4 setups might not show up and bring your setup count down to 4 instead of 8.

These situations require you to be flexible to fit your timetable. It sucks for the players, but it is how it hast to be.



If you have any questions, let me know. Pools Only is awesome.

Benefits to Pools Only:
-The majority of people get many more matches, generally those who make it to Round 2 Pools get an extra 4 or 5 sets.

-It prevents bottlenecks naturally; with a double elim bracket you can have one guy taking 8 minutes per game holding up multiple matches. With pools, that doesn't happen often and when it does you have more TVs open from other pools to help make sure the rest of the pool finishes on time. On top of that, you can often seed the next round of pools without seeing the results of one guy in one pool! It's fantastic as a TO.

-It allows for more friendlies. Given that you have an obvious formula to determine how many TVs you can use at once (Players in tournament divided by 2), you can easily set aside TVs for just friendlies. Got 30 people? Need 15 TVs. After round 1, you will need half of that. With a modest 12 TVs for a 30 man tournament, you would be slightly bottlenecked for round 1, then need only 7-8 TVs for round 2, then 3 TVs for round 3 finals. This means there's no "is this TV for friendlies"; you just get friendly/money match TVs

-Every match is important. There's no more "sandbagging" in pools, especially if you use the FC ruleset (it looks at previous pool history to break ties in some situations). A lot of people complain about there being "no finals", but this is rarely the case. If it is, that means someone is 2-0ing everyone and the finals of a bracket would be boring anyway. With pools you get to see matches determining their placement in the money in that final round... for every match. I saw a $25 money match at the last round of pools today; it was exciting even though I already knew who got 1st.

-It completely eliminates traditional bull****.

Seriously, you can't play a character like Fox in a double elim bracket. We had two in our finals because that one 0-2 loss didn't screw them over. Hell, the guy who got FIFTH in our tournament lost SIX SETS this tournament. You're normally out after losing two. There is a huge amount of leeway here, allowing for people to experiment and play characters that have bad matchups.

You can play Donkey Kong in pools only and lose horribly to a D3 and still make it out of pools!

You don't get wrecked by bracket anymore!

-It's awesome for the TO.

The TO doesn't have to listen to people complain about "playing their friends" in round 3!

You don't have to deal with "who gets a bye" because NO ONE gets a bye!

It's simple math formulas, not "who played who or what random skill leve will this be biased should I move these two people" crap.

-It allows for MORE STAGES in a FAIR ENVIRONMENT by RESTRICTING STAGE USAGE NATURALLY IN A POSITIVE FORM

I play ROB sometimes in tournament. I like ROB, he's got a lot of good counterpicks. He's not fantastic on them, but he's pretty good on them. Some characters have more than one bad stage.

When it comes to a 2/3, a lot of times people will complain they can only ban "one stage", but that's just a failing of their character. If you're bad on multiple stages, it's easier for you to get CPed. This can result in getting wrecked in bracket too; someone happens to play a character like Wario with Norfair/Brinstar legal.

When it comes to a 3/5 though, THE ENTIRE GAME CHANGES. Suddenly, Marth with Smashville/Battlefield/PS1/Final Destination is in a WAY better position than the Wario that previously had Brinstar/Norfair, because Marth gets to ban Wario's Norfair while Wario only gets to ban ONE of Marth's good stages.

Is this fair? Is this right?

Of course not. One player gets an arbitrary advantage just because they happened to make it to 3/5.

With Pools Only, you play 2/3 the entire tournament AND you can have way more stages because it allows for more swingy behavior.

You playing against a Wario and Norfair is legal and you can't ban it? You might feel shafted in a double elim bracket, but in pools you can grin and bear it and move on to the next challenger. The actual IMPACT of that counterpick advantage is lessened overall, and it also remains constant.

-It's a ton of fun and everyone loves it

I played a total of 9 sets today, placing 3rd in round 2 of pools by one game. Super close, but was fun. One game win more and I would have played 5 more sets!

If it was a double elimination bracket I would have played 6 sets total if I made it to grand finals without losing a single game. Even with the first round pools, that's a total of 11 sets assuming I made it to grand finals in a double elimination bracket. If I had gone all through loser's bracket from round 1 and won grand finals I would have gotten to play 15 sets.

I got to play 9 sets, and so did over a dozen other people. Those that made it to the top 6 got to play a whopping 14, which is more than anyone in a double elimination bracket could have played save for one person who went all the way through Loser's Round 1 to Grand Finals.

Pools are AWESOME and the double elimination bracket should disappear for anything but super huge tournaments.

Oh, and one more thing:


After you do one of these things once?

You get a clear and consistent "power ranking" for all the people that attend your tournaments.

In other words, you can seed pools early on by saying "I have X pools, and the top X players from the last event were these players". Totally impartial.

Overswarm, this thread is sexy as all hell. Seriously. Have my babies.

This is ingenious.

Well done, OS.

OS just completed a tourney with this format. We had I think...33 players that attended. A total of 10 pools (6 1st round, 3 2nd round, and 1 final round) and we got the tourney done in 5 1/2 hours AND it was still daylight! He already explained this in the OP, but I'm just overall satisfied with the result.

The tournament he hosted with this format was super efficient. It was great, and people got in way more matches than they would in any bracket.

brb enjoying Smash again.

Your math is wrong. 4 people in a pool is 3+2+1 sets (4P2), not 4+3+2+1 sets. This inflates your advertised number of sets per tournament by a hefty amount.

Otherwise, I like this very much :3

I could go for this, as long as TOs and the players both follow what they're supposed to do. I like the idea of not getting bracket ****ed also.

Ishieymoro said:

Your math is wrong. 4 people in a pool is 3+2+1 sets (4P2), not 4+3+2+1 sets. This inflates your advertised number of sets per tournament by a hefty amount.

Otherwise, I like this very much :3

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Haha, oh well. Don't care. Posted it stream of consciousness at midnight, not even gonna edit.

Sweet thread OS I might use and advocate this when I'm able to host a tournament myself

I like this idea a lot for small-ish events. Anything over 40 (?) attendents tho... would likely result in madness. For the appropriate size tho, this is preferable to a bracket.

PrivateJoker-Brown said:

I like this idea a lot for small-ish events. Anything over 40 (?) attendents tho... would likely result in madness. For the appropriate size tho, this is preferable to a bracket.

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If you have more people, it's still faster. You just have to be more draconian or have more setups.

This is a fantastic concept. I wish the T.Os in my state weren't so closed minded.

Overswarm said:

If you have more people, it's still faster. You just have to be more draconian or have more setups.

Click to expand...

It's not really faster since you need to run a similar number of rounds to get a similar result. Having more setups will make your tournament run faster regardless of structure.

I think the most appealing thing is that it lessens the chance of being bracket ****ed. Whether it's character-wise, playing a 100-0 MU, player-wise, or just a better chance of doing well. I like it, but I'd need to try it.

hichez50 said:

This is a fantastic concept. I wish the T.Os in my state weren't so closed minded.

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**** 'em, host your own.

Overswarm said:

**** 'em, host your own.

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Easier said than done. I want to host but so much work goes into doing that. A whole lot of stuff you got to work out before you just start hosting.

Bobwithlobsters said:

Easier said than done. I want to host but so much work goes into doing that. A whole lot of stuff you got to work out before you just start hosting.

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Bull****. What you need?

You need a place?

Find a friend with a house, charge $5 venue fee. Tell your friend to sell 20 oz. pop for $1, you can buy 'em in bulk from a surplus store for around 0.50 for a 0.50 profit per bottle sold. Assuming a small 20 man tournament not counting the TO, your friend just made $100 plus up to $10 in concession from pop alone. Do this once a month and he's raking in $1100 a year under the table untaxed.

No friend with a house or apartment big enough? Rent out a venue and charge the venue fee accordingly with a note saying that money will be taken out of the pot to pay for the venue if not enough people show up.

There are ways.


You need setups?

Craigslist has CRTs for the grand old price of free if you're willing to just drive and grab 'em.

Need Wiis? You've got one, everyone else has got one, get people to bring a Wii with them.


Don't know how to run a tournament?

Go to someone who does and ask for help, and ask to help a TO at his next tournament. If you're at a complete loss, just do a straight double elimination bracket with random seeding and no pools and I guarantee you someone will volunteer to seed your next event.


What more does it take? Running a tournament is a cakewalk, the hardest part is finding a place to go.

Basically that. However, as long as you have a laptop it's easy to download stat tracking programs (for free), so even if you have to random seed the first time, seeding the second time is as easy as plugging in numbers from the stats you've already tracked from previous tournaments.

I'm confused how only seeding the top player in each pool keeps a lot of good players from still knocking each other out early, while less experienced players have their placements inflated.

Other than that, I like the idea.

"Good", "early" and "inflated" are the subjective variables that this system removes. What a system like this does (especially if run in a series) is it prevents people from saying "oh, he should have made it farther but he got unlucky due to x". If the difference between seeds 2 + 3 in the "regular" system are as clear as you say then it shouldn't matter what pool you place those "regular 2+3" seeds in because they'll obtain their appropriate seed and move on to the next round

As an attendee for this pools format, I found that this format had three advantages to bracket.

Constant matches: Less time to report matches/get next match from TO/find oppenent made this tournament go wicked fast. Everyone you needed to play was right there next to you, you could coordinate the play order to however you felt was most effecient rather than a TO micromanging your match schedule. This was awesome.

Bracket BS: OS sums it up pretty well but one bad MU doesn't mean that you have to spend the rest of your tournament in losers bracket. Also less drama with car pools and same region player coordination.

Less waiting: This kinda goes back to the first point but you don't have to wait an hour to play your next match. This is amazing. If you win two bracket matches you inevitably have to wait one or two matches until your opponent/setup is determined/ready, this waiting time sucks. The only waiting time is to actually setup the next pool, which seems like way less work than making brackets.

*Cam* said:

I'm confused how only seeding the top player in each pool keeps a lot of good players from still knocking each other out early, while less experienced players have their placements inflated.

Other than that, I like the idea.

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No one deserves to get out until they get out. Coming in with the mindset of "well these 16 people should make it to round 2, so we'll make sure to put only easy people in their pools to guarantee it" is a ****ty way to run a tournament.

Yes, there can be hard pools. But you know what? You can have a tournament with a hard pool.

Yes, there can be someone who "sneaks by" to round 2. They won't make it to round 3.


I take the top players and separate them cleanly; one per pool. With a 31 man tournament I had 5 pools of 6, one of 7, and those top 6 players were separated. Assuming my predictions were correct and those top 6 were separated for first round pools happened to be the very best 6 that could never lose ever, then they would inevitably get 1st, be seeded 1st and thus separated in round 2 pools, and then all of them would take all the money spots.

Six seems like the magic number for starting pool size and end pool size OS.

sneakytako said:

Six seems like the magic number for starting pool size and end pool size OS.

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After we talked about pool numbers I had thought about it, and realized two TVs was the most common amount per pool. Realizing that 3 TVs was optimal for a 6 man pool, I feel this allows for the most matches between players while compensating for any extra time this would take due to only 4/6 of the players playing at one time; once one pool is done, two other pools immediately are advanced to optimal setup usage.

Having 8 players would require 4 setups, and would result in a bottleneck towards teh end and longer wait times.

Less waiting: This kinda goes back to the first point but you don't have to wait an hour to play your next match. This is amazing. If you win two bracket matches you inevitably have to wait one or two matches until your opponent/setup is determined/ready, this waiting time sucks. The only waiting time is to actually setup the next pool, which seems like way less work than making brackets

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You have no idea. With a bracket you constantly have to plan multiple matches ahead and if there was a car with 5 people showing up and none of them want to play each other it's damn impossible.

But with pools, the only fiddling I had to do was to make sure someone didn't have the same people in their pool between rounds; I only had to make one change there, just needed to make sure that in that change I didn't screw someone else up. Took maybe 2 minutes to discover the optimal solution and another 2 minutes to get another set of eyes to look it over to overcome any potential bias or ignorance on my part.

Overswarm said:

No one deserves to get out until they get out. Coming in with the mindset of "well these 16 people should make it to round 2, so we'll make sure to put only easy people in their pools to guarantee it" is a ****ty way to run a tournament.

Yes, there can be hard pools. But you know what? You can have a tournament with a hard pool.

Yes, there can be someone who "sneaks by" to round 2. They won't make it to round 3.


I take the top players and separate them cleanly; one per pool. With a 31 man tournament I had 5 pools of 6, one of 7, and those top 6 players were separated. Assuming my predictions were correct and those top 6 were separated for first round pools happened to be the very best 6 that could never lose ever, then they would inevitably get 1st, be seeded 1st and thus separated in round 2 pools, and then all of them would take all the money spots.

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It's not about putting easy people to guarantee that said people will move on. It's about saying here's the top 6, so we'll separate them out. Here's the next 6, separated, next 6, etc. The point is to have easy and tough players in each pool rather than an easy pools and hard pools, it makes fair pools.

It's more fair for newer players too. What if a decent player gets stuck with #1, #7, #8, #9, and #10 in his pool? You just made it impossible to get out by that point, whereas with good seeding, that player might just have to overcome one or two players that otherwise he wouldn't. Just being able to predict who will get out doesn't mean you are rigging it so they do. I can look at a bracket and tell that a great player is going to beat a bad player, but that doesn't mean I manipulated the bracket by seeding it. Seeding pools to have a player from each echelon isn't bracket manipulation, it's just more fair for everyone involved.

I would like to try this format, but like I said, I would seed the first round of pools more thoroughly than you would.

It's not about putting easy people to guarantee that said people will move on. It's about saying here's the top 6, so we'll separate them out. Here's the next 6, separated, next 6, etc. The point is to have easy and tough players in each pool rather than an easy pools and hard pools, it makes fair pools.

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That isn't fair. That is bracket manipulation. You are cheating. Doing that is deliberately hamstringing players that you deem "not as good" and giving an advantage to people you think are "good".

You can't quantify player skill very easily. There are a number of variables, including how often people have played together, characters played, personal experience in the matchup, etc., all on top of a player's skill level. Unless you've got a series of events where these people played each other and you're using those results for seeding, you're cheating. You are manipulating the bracket to make someone have a harder or easier time.

"What if someone's pool is too hard"? So what? The goal of a tournament isn't to order people from 1st to last. It's to order people from 1st to X, where X is the last place you pay out. Everyone else's placement is completely irrelevant. Sure, it's nice to say "I got 8th" or "I got 16th" and feel you've earned it, but the only people that "earn" anything are those that place in the money. That's how tournaments are designed.

I'm all for getting people as far as they can, but you know what? I got 3rd in 2nd round pools by a single game. I could have advanced in that pool, and could have advanced in other pools. Does this mean I should have looked at my pool and said "Oh, I might not advance in this one but I'll definitely advance in this one, so I'll move me over there. Seeing as how I wouldn't get last place in any group of 6 possible for the top placements this should be correct"?

Where is the line? How are you determining these seeds?

The only time, ever, that I have heard of a tournament actually being seeded properly was at MLG. Everyone came in completely blank, totally random, and you earned your seed. From then on, everyone was seeded based on past performance. That is how a typical competition works.

A typical competition generally has some sort of failsafe though; double elim brackets have a loser's bracket, pools have a top # moving on. This gives some leeway for the players. A TO trying to make things "fair" by playing psychic with who "should" be making a placement is cheating their players.

Well, we are basing it off of past tournament results and Power Rankings, so it's not about being psychic. I have all our past results compiled on our page for easy access. We also have four players do the seeding to make sure no one is just trying to give themselves an advantage. This isn't cheating, this is making things more fair. I'm not just saying "I don't think so and so is good," but instead I'm basing it off of past facts. I've been given really crummy pools seeding at my own tournaments before, and it was fair every time it happened because it was at a time that I was lower on the PR.

We don't just seed based on skill. We also seed based on who played who recently.

Also, it sounds to me that if you are so against this "cheating," then you should be more against seeding the people that are actually making money.

PRs seeding is whack anyway. PRs are a snapshot and the PR you are referencing is months old with events happening anyway. Your argument is much stronger if you leave PRs out of it.

We don't just seed based on skill. We also seed based on who played who recently.

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How is that not bracket manipulation?

Seeding your top 6 apart is bracket manipulation. It's a matter of how much bracket manipulation your scene is okay with. In a double elimination setting with no pools, who played who recently is an understandable thing to want to adjust. That is an issue that should not be present in a pools only format.

I guess technically it is "bracket manipulation," but that's a really loaded word in our community because we tie that to cheating. Not all bracket manipulation is cheating though.

I don't see how bracket manipulation is a bad thing. It makes us get the most out of our entry fee and there are a lot of good examples for this :
-I do not want to pay 10 bucks to play my roomie or crew leader. I can do that all week long.
-I do not want to see a M2K-9B set happen on the first round of brackets, everyone will be playing and there will be no hype. Plus it means that as a counterpart, two people will have a bracket much easier than they deserve.
-I do not want to play in pools/bracket somebody if we planned to moneymatch already.

Arbitrary seeding is cool too. I used to be overrated because I had beaten a few hype people out of luck and surprise effect, and I always had easy pools and got ***** in brackets. I told my TO that this had to change, and since then I have only ever had hard pools in which I learned a looooot more. Pools like these are worth my 10 bucks even if I only get past them half of the time.

Getting more out of your money only happens to the better half of the players while the lower half of the players actually get less out of their money. Your point is valid if you only take into consideration half of the people at any given tournament.

The Ben said:

Getting more out of your money only happens to the better half of the players while the lower half of the players actually get less out of their money. Your point is valid if you only take into consideration half of the people at any given tournament.

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How do you figure it being less? If you drown in the first round of pools in this format, you would've drowned in pools at a tourney with a double elimination bracket. Either way, you only got to play a round of pools. The difference is if you make it out, you get to lose more than 2 matches. In fact, you can lose 2 matches in the next round and STILL ADVANCE. In bracket, 2 loses means ur out.

PrivateJoker-Brown said:

How do you figure it being less? If you drown in the first round of pools in this format, you would've drowned in pools at a tourney with a double elimination bracket. Either way, you only got to play a round of pools. The difference is if you make it out, you get to lose more than 2 matches. In fact, you can lose 2 matches in the next round and STILL ADVANCE. In bracket, 2 loses means ur out.

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I wasn't referencing this format specifically. I was answering a point Teneban was making about how seeding gives players more for their money. It only gives more to the better half of players, while giving the worse half less opportunity by putting them against players they'll likely lose against immediately. It's less of a problem with pools and effects double elimination more, but it still creates pools where less skilled players are likely to get eliminated early based slightly on manipulation.

I like this very much. I will be hosting a tournament using this format as soon as I can. I see no disadvantage to this system at all compared to the common format. Yay for consistency.

The Ben said:

I wasn't referencing this format specifically. I was answering a point Teneban was making about how seeding gives players more for their money. It only gives more to the better half of players, while giving the worse half less opportunity by putting them against players they'll likely lose against immediately. It's less of a problem with pools and effects double elimination more, but it still creates pools where less skilled players are likely to get eliminated early based slightly on manipulation.

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So you ask a TO to sacrifice the pleasure of his most faithful half of attendees for the placement of the other half which is not even expected to have a good placement to begin with.
Tbh, the less skilled players consider tournaments as a way to make friends that will help them improve. It's not like they can pretend winning money or engraving their performance in Smash history and there's no reason to help them at doing such a thing.