elaborate on the particularities of this format
if you have one , share the excel !
Please explain!
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It’s really easy.
It’s a single elimination with a double eliminiation disguise.
Once you loose a game, you cannot win the tournament.
The real finale is the winner bracket finale and the game for 3rd place is the first loose bracket finale.
This format was used in FHBPC to save time (no looser bracket finale + no double finale : 3 games saved + a lot of waiting time between games) and to allow every team to play at least 2 games on sunday.
I don’t really like this format because it has the disavantages of double and single together. Also, your 1st game on Sunday is REALLY important if you look for the 1st place.
An alternative allowing every team to play more games + saving time could be to had one or two rounds on Sunday morning and go to single elimination with less teams.
Example for 16 teams :
Judo Double elimination : 28 games
2 rounds (16 teams) + Single elim (8 teams) : 24 games
You could also start the Sunday with 4 groups of 4 teams so every one plays 3 games and then move to a 8 teams single elimination. It will be a total 32 games, so one more game than a standard 16teams double elimination but with leeeeeeess wait !
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Thanks for explaining! I think this sounds interesting, it combines the excitement of single elim with the knowledge everyone gets to keep playing once they are out.
For me the worst part of double elim is the last stage where you very often see the same matchup three times in a row - sure its good to decide who is the best team, but to play or to watch the same game over and over again is just booooooring!
Overall I think keeping a variety is a good thing, some single elim tournaments, sone double elim, sone brac system ones, lets keep it interesting
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Thanks for explaining!
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for a world championship tho , going single or judo format is very tough
i would like a format that :
-
give every teams a chance to play each other once , since they travel from far and rarely play each other
-
each games should be important so a team cannot hide their full ability until the last day
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taking in account reffing capacity before throwing a huge amount of courts and games per rounds , or results in reffering may vary from one game to another
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I think playing a full round robin is impossible to achieve, heres sone math:
If every team plays each other thats N*(N-1)/2 games where N is the number of teams.
Thats a lot of games, for example for 20 teams we get 190 games, for 48 teams (I think thats roughly what we had at the last worlds?) we’d have to play a whopping 1128 games!
Planning with 25mins per game and 10 hours of play (which is generous) we get 24 games per court each day. So you can figure out how many days and courts it would take to pull that off. 20 teams is barely possible in 3-4 days, but Id like to have more teams playing!
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IMHO in that format loser of winners bracket final should play a game with losers bracket final for 2nd place. The winner will always have no losses, second will have only one loss, and third will have two losses. That’s how they do it in Judo AFAIK but not in main competitions (at worlds, olympics etc. etc. there are repechages etc. etc. which is even more crazy).
My favourite one is classic double elim :D I didn’t spend half of my polo life explaining other people how it works to now start with a new system :D
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how about using all the regional qualifiers classment as seeding on the first days ?
or to form leveled groups that will go through round robins ?
so you have a group with top 5 nah and euro etc
then in the second day using the usual stats W/L/D to match teams that were not necessarly in the same group ?
also how to implement a value that translate a win against a top team is not the same than a win against a bottom team ?
i keep on thinking of the wildcard at whbpc perpignan and how lizards got X out of the main competition meanwhile Tranquilo ( my team ) managed to sneak in, it doesnt really reflect “which team is the best” but more like which team navigate the best within their match up …
I suppose it is all about “configuration” of swiss rounds, there is plenty things to select:
- initial seeding (probably should be based on a ranking somehow)
- pairing system (a lot of to select from)
- tie braking algorithm (a lot of to select from)
- point system (how much points for win, how much points for tie)
Swiss rounds are made, exactly, to get a representative ranking when you cannot do a Round Robin.
That’s why there should be a double elimination after Swiss rounds . They are not precise enough to get a perfect ranking. The double elimination allows teams that were “unlucky” in the rounds to make their way to the top.
A few things I learned about Swiss Rounds :
- Seeding is mandatory in Swiss Rounds,
- There is a right number of rounds / number of teams ratio : if you have too much teams and not enough rounds : some teams will go to the top without any tough games, some will go to the bottom playing too many tough games. In the opposite, you will have useless games at some point. Challonge helps with showing the “right number” that should be done.
- We should never, ever, send a game of the new round if the round before is not over, especially at the beginning of the tournament.
I agree with Benji that Swiss Rounds, when used as a short single stage (5 games) with a lot of teams, are unfair. On the other hand I have no other idea on how to rank 30 teams with 5 games.
Then, more personnal opinion :
- Win : 3pts
- Tie : 1 pt
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I believe that we need some chess grandmaster tournament creator to find right seeding strategy, right pointing, right tie braking, right pairing and right number of games for our case.
For sure the more games in SR the better, maybe we should keep the same groups in group stage for 2 days for Euros and Worlds?
In the end of the day that’s why double elim is so helpful - it is more resistant for poor seeding.
The most important bit is the number of rounds you play whennusing swiss rounds. (Too many rounds is also bad, it creatures games towards the end that should not be played, like a mid team against the nr 1 and another mid team against last place, thats unfair!)
But you will be getting some random games in the first few rounds. Its just a fact of swiss rounds, even super careful initial seeding can onlt “fix” the very first round. If you dont want this, I think loads of small groups playing round robin (like it was done in zurich) is the way to go, but thay has other challenges…
In the end if the day the feasibility for the organisers is also a factor to keep in mind. Having the option to set the first games before a round ends is suuuuper helpful, saves a lot of time and allows for more rounds! And I think it is often not that problematic if you make sure you play enough rounds and to have the games in the same “order” (i.e. top ranked teams go first always).
Yeah you are right…
I’ve found that in chess there is an equation for number of rounds:
ROUND(SQRT(32)) + 1
So it goes like:
| Number of teams | Number of rounds |
|---|---|
| 12 | 4 |
| 14 | 5 |
| 16 | 5 |
| 18 | 5 |
| 20 | 5 |
| 22 | 6 |
| 24 | 6 |
| 26 | 6 |
| 28 | 6 |
| 30 | 6 |
We should remember that and the end of the day tournament format should be mostly focused on delivering the most fair and square results for the top teams. Of course we can think about improving results just next to the boundary of qualifying to the final day or not but probably not on the cost of bringing some unfairness or randomness in top group 
For sure there is a work to be done for next euros. Did we have any working group in EHBA focused on euro’s format in the past?
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Lol, yes of course, we had 10 people working only on this around the clock, next to the 100 people working on funding, 1000 people working on ref education, and 10000 working on youth programms. 
The procedure since Torino 2016/Perpignan 2017 was that I worked together with the host on a format and involved opinions from some trusted experts. Every year dependend on circumstances (event size, play time per day, lessons learned, new ideas) there were changes. A lot has been tried in terms of formats, grouping, regrouping, elimination etc. with the result that after a long loop we came back to the roots last year with a rather simple swiss, swiss, DE (with double final) in both worlds and euros. For some reason it is what is by a long stretch the most popular format and it is also our “historic” format.
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Accept my apologies. I didn’t want to offend you in any way, and I wasn’t complaining, either. I just want to help. I would be really happy to be a part of that group, even if it is only you and me. I was thinking that if there was such a group of people, it would be smart to use their experience to avoid previously made mistakes.
Imho it should be swiss, swiss and DE as well. Probably we could work on or discuss swiss rounds variatons/configuration.
p.s.
It looks like half of the thread is not really related to the original subject, should we move it somewhere else?
What about a single elimination with a “best of three” series? 6 minute games…
It has the second chance element without the complications of double elim.
Also, if you schedule the whole 18 minutes it gives you slack to work with as many matchups will not require all three games.