Paintyr
Smash Rookie
When running a tournament that uses preregistration for players how do the death pools work for the non-registered players that show up?
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How do death pools work?
- Thread starter Paintyr
- Start date
tyronimacaroni
Smash Rookie
Well, that depends on how many of those non-registered players you want entering into the next round.
Let us suppose you had set up a tournament format intended to hold 160 players. All 160 spots are taken by registered players, but in the end it turns out that only 157 of them were able to make it. This would mean you want to set up the death pools in a certain way to allow 3 survivors to emerge among the non-regs and join the 157 regs in the tournament format you had set up beforehand. You could go about this several ways:
Assuming you wanted death pools to finish as soon as possible, you could hold a single elimination bracket (lose one set, you're out) with a third place set between losing semifinalists, as this would give you a set of three players to advance (the two finalists, who really would have no need to play their final in this case as they will both advance anyway, plus the winner of the third place set.) Proper seeding would be unnecessary and even impractical for this death pool (as it is implied that un-reg players are just lower-skilled "wild cards" to fill in the missing spots and that their relative skill level will not significantly impact the progress of the entire 160-player tournament), so just seed such a death pool randomly.
If you wanted death pool to last a little longer, and perhaps yield a more accurate final result of the "best" 3, you may want to consider a double elimination, once again randomly seeded. This tournament format will allow the death-pool participants to lose two sets before they are out, so it less likely that a random upset victory will completely eliminate a higher-skilled player too quickly from the death-pool. In addition, the way that a double elim is set up, there would be no need for a third place set as this kind of bracket automatically determines 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 2 5th places, 2 7th places, 4 9th places, 4 13th places, 8 17th places, 8 25th places, etc. Once you have only three players remaining, there wouldn't even be a need to play the remaining sets as all 3 of those will advance anyway.
Any other formats would be highly impractical for a death-pool as they would take too much time, unless your number of players in the deathpool is low (for example, for 7 players or less in the death pool, a round robin (everybody plays everybody one set) to determine the top x number of players might be feasible and not too long, as long as you have at least 2 or 3 setups).
Just remember this advice and adapt it to your needs depending on # of players in death pool, number you want advancing, time constraints, number of setups available, etc. etc. Ultimately, you are the TO and people will play by the rules and format you see fit. Do what you must, and have a good tournament.
P.S. Any of these three formats I mentioned, a website named challonge.com can help you manage these digitally and keep the bracket stored online. It is an excellent reliable tool.
Let us suppose you had set up a tournament format intended to hold 160 players. All 160 spots are taken by registered players, but in the end it turns out that only 157 of them were able to make it. This would mean you want to set up the death pools in a certain way to allow 3 survivors to emerge among the non-regs and join the 157 regs in the tournament format you had set up beforehand. You could go about this several ways:
Assuming you wanted death pools to finish as soon as possible, you could hold a single elimination bracket (lose one set, you're out) with a third place set between losing semifinalists, as this would give you a set of three players to advance (the two finalists, who really would have no need to play their final in this case as they will both advance anyway, plus the winner of the third place set.) Proper seeding would be unnecessary and even impractical for this death pool (as it is implied that un-reg players are just lower-skilled "wild cards" to fill in the missing spots and that their relative skill level will not significantly impact the progress of the entire 160-player tournament), so just seed such a death pool randomly.
If you wanted death pool to last a little longer, and perhaps yield a more accurate final result of the "best" 3, you may want to consider a double elimination, once again randomly seeded. This tournament format will allow the death-pool participants to lose two sets before they are out, so it less likely that a random upset victory will completely eliminate a higher-skilled player too quickly from the death-pool. In addition, the way that a double elim is set up, there would be no need for a third place set as this kind of bracket automatically determines 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 2 5th places, 2 7th places, 4 9th places, 4 13th places, 8 17th places, 8 25th places, etc. Once you have only three players remaining, there wouldn't even be a need to play the remaining sets as all 3 of those will advance anyway.
Any other formats would be highly impractical for a death-pool as they would take too much time, unless your number of players in the deathpool is low (for example, for 7 players or less in the death pool, a round robin (everybody plays everybody one set) to determine the top x number of players might be feasible and not too long, as long as you have at least 2 or 3 setups).
Just remember this advice and adapt it to your needs depending on # of players in death pool, number you want advancing, time constraints, number of setups available, etc. etc. Ultimately, you are the TO and people will play by the rules and format you see fit. Do what you must, and have a good tournament.
P.S. Any of these three formats I mentioned, a website named challonge.com can help you manage these digitally and keep the bracket stored online. It is an excellent reliable tool.
Last edited:
Paintyr
Smash Rookie
Super late in saying this, but thank you for the advice! It's really appreciated