Pools Only: You should do it because it is faster and better

[Overswarm]

http://smashboards.com/threads/pool...aster-than-double-elimination-bracket.324691/

Made this thread for Brawl, but the TL;DR of this is using pool only is faster, better, and people enjoy it more. This should seriously be a standard for tournaments. Any TOs want to make this happen?

 

[Gimpyfish62]

except i'm a good to and i run my tournaments very efficiently and if people want to eat they get to do it when they either have time or they decide to forfeit their matches woohoooooooo

 

[B.W.]

Faster =/= better. Personally I'd enjoy a "pools only" setting way less than how we do things now.

I'm not there to plug in, play, then leave. I go to tournaments expecting to play a bunch of Smash. I want to spend all day around that ****.

 

[Shadic]

....Pools generally have you play more though...

 

[Overswarm]

Faster =/= better. Personally I'd enjoy a "pools only" setting way less than how we do things now.

I'm not there to plug in, play, then leave. I go to tournaments expecting to play a bunch of Smash. I want to spend all day around that ****.

You get a significantly larger amount of tournament and friendly matches with pools only. You actually get to assign certain TVs as "friendly only" after the first round or second round of hte tournament depending on player/setup count.

 

[Gimpyfish62]

i would MUCH rather run pools for everything ever if there were time to do so haha

pools are the best

 

[Oro?!]

We've ran pools basically the whole way through before and it has a lot of negatives as well. If you tank your first few sets, and you literally have no way to advance to the next wave of pools, then you have no incentive to actually perform the rest of your pool. Also it detracts a lot of the hype from a finals set(s) since there really aren't set finals for a long time if at all. The first and second place finishers could play each other first in the last wave of pools, then sweep the rest of the pool and make everything seem very anticlimactic.

 

[Overswarm]

i would MUCH rather run pools for everything ever if there were time to do so haha

pools are the best

Pools are faster than bracket. We've tested it a couple of times, it is always faster if you do the 3 round rule. First round pool split in half total players, 2nd round go down to the amount of people getting paid. If you have to do 4 rounds it might be faster or slower depending on how many setups you have, but for a standard 32 man bracket or anything near it? Pools is faster.

We've ran pools basically the whole way through before and it has a lot of negatives as well. If you tank your first few sets, and you literally have no way to advance to the next wave of pools, then you have no incentive to actually perform the rest of your pool. Also it detracts a lot of the hype from a finals set(s) since there really aren't set finals for a long time if at all. The first and second place finishers could play each other first in the last wave of pools, then sweep the rest of the pool and make everything seem very anticlimactic.

I never really got the whole "no incentive to actually perform". I guess other people just view it differently, but I'm always of the mind that each set matters in a vacuum.

No finals sucks, but we generally dictate which matches are being played (at least to begin with) in the final pool to increase hype towards the end. It's not a perfect solution, but it's the best I could think up at the time.

 

[Mithost]

I've played Magic: The Gathering tournaments using pools only. It's much better for beginners and it gets more people involved for longer, so everyone has more fun. The whole "anti-climatic ending" is averted because the event as a whole takes less time, and each player will individually push on for longer for a spot in the prize pool. I find it more fun, and it DOES go much faster.

I'm not sure how this changes for Smash though, seeing that there is no need to bring setups (most venues have enough tables for around 20 games to be going on at a time, and there is always the floor). Magic can take anywhere from 2 minutes to 20 minutes for a round (average at about 8?), and it's best of three.

 

[Overswarm]

The finals thing really is a large negative though, mithost. While it isn't really important, it's one of the main "high profile" events in the smash community. When people talk about tournaments they almost always exclusively talk about the finals. There is the occasionally other high profile matches (mew2king and armada, dashizwiz and mew2king, SS and Darkrain, Camper Bob and Ken, etc.) whether due to rivalrly, high skill, or hilarious hijinks, but they are significantly more rare.

Removing the finals removes one of the ways we experience smash as a group.

Hearing "Dude, OS1 was an awesome tourney! The finals were Metroid vs. Gimpyfish, went to last game last set" is more exciting and easily relatable than "Dude, OS1 was awesome! The last pool was Metroid, Gimpyfish, Overswarm, Mithost, Majora88, and Kirk! Their following set results were...."

 

[Kink-Link5]

I'm down for this just to see how it affects the character "rankings."

 

[metroid1117]

I'm not sure how I feel about pools-only, mostly because of the issues that Oro brought up. It sounds like a neat idea though, I'd be down to try it.

The finals thing really is a large negative though, mithost. While it isn't really important, it's one of the main "high profile" events in the smash community. When people talk about tournaments they almost always exclusively talk about the finals. There is the occasionally other high profile matches (mew2king and armada, dashizwiz and mew2king, SS and Darkrain, Camper Bob and Ken, etc.) whether due to rivalrly, high skill, or hilarious hijinks, but they are significantly more rare.

Removing the finals removes one of the ways we experience smash as a group.

Hearing "Dude, OS1 was an awesome tourney! The finals were Metroid vs. Gimpyfish, went to last game last set" is more exciting and easily relatable than "Dude, OS1 was awesome! The last pool was Metroid, Gimpyfish, Overswarm, Mithost, Majora88, and Kirk! Their following set results were...."

Results-wise it may not be as exciting, but in-person I'd imagine that it has a much more powerful effect. I wasn't able to go to FC: Legacy, but I would have been super excited to witness the 8-man round-robin for PM and Melee in-person. By carefully monitoring the record of each player like they did at FC, you can save the set between the two most dominant players for last and still maintain a sort of GF hype. Again though, it'd only be the most hype for the people actually there and not for the people watching recorded matches after the fact.

 

[Juushichi]

The way that it ended up, I believe that the "top" of that bracket managed to be played anyway. HBox vs Mango I believe was the last match played at that tournament. It's tricky to manage, but possible.

A GF of like... Reflex vs Kirk would be hype.

But if a final pool of Reflex, Strong_Bad, Eli, Gimpyfish, Kirk, and Sethlon was the end all be-all for my tournament experience...

Holy **** that would be memorable.

 

[Gimpyfish62]

pools isn't faster than a bracket if you run your tournament effectively though - which i do, which is a main point in your original post.

 

[MVP]

pools isn't faster than a bracket if you run your tournament effectively though - which i do, which is a main point in your original post.

also, pools don't have anywhere near the hype brackets do

 

[Overswarm]

pools isn't faster than a bracket if you run your tournament effectively though - which i do, which is a main point in your original post.

It's faster relative to the amount of sets you get regardless :B

I ran my tournaments as efficiently as I possibly could and pools was still faster because there was never a bottleneck, primarily. Not as big of a problem in Melee or Project M though; Brawl would occasionally have a tense set that went to the 3rd game and it'd take at least 7-10 minutes longer that would create a sort of bottleneck which would create MORE bottlenecks because there's no real way to speed that process up with the bracket format. I don't think you'd have the same issue with Melee or M though, so I can't think of anything pools would allow you to do that you couldn't do in bracket other than just "more games".

 

[Kink-Link5]

Brawl had tense sets? I'll just take your word for it. I don't think I could stomach 17+ minutes of it.

 

[Overswarm]

Brawl had tense sets? I'll just take your word for it. I don't think I could stomach 17+ minutes of it.

It's okay, not everyone's cut out for it.

 

[MVP]

Brawl had tense sets? I'll just take your word for it. I don't think I could stomach 17+ minutes of it.

people don't like it in melee when jiggs goes 6min, so i'd probably kill myself looking at brawl O.o

also, i haven't played brawl in years

 

[Ace55]

people don't like it in melee when jiggs goes 6min, so i'd probably kill myself looking at brawl O.o

also, i haven't played brawl in years

I entered a brawl tourney two weeks ago as a gesture to get brawl players to enter the PM tourney (which kinda worked). Hadn't touched in like 4 years before that and I swear I'm never touching it again. Feels like you're fighting in water...

Edit: Also 1 W1nged @ngel's signature.



Oh yeah pools. If it really doesn't take more time I'm all for it. It's a much better system than bracket when it comes to determining results. I for one thought the 8 man pool at FC: Legacy was amazing. Resulted in way more high level matches to watch. Although I admit knock out system has it charm too. More at stake in every set.

 

[Rat]

MTG usually does Swiss into top 8 single elimination bracket.
I would not object to a similar format. Pools into top 4/8 single elimination.


Also how come nobody runs single elimination?
In double elimination the second chance doesn't really happen. It's extremely rare for a player to come back from losers and win.

 

[Oracle]

pools isn't faster than a bracket if you run your tournament effectively though - which i do, which is a main point in your original post.

This. It seems like you just run your tournaments pretty strictly OS, rather than the pools actually bring better

 

[Ace55]

Also how come nobody runs single elimination?
In double elimination the second chance doesn't really happen. It's extremely rare for a player to come back from losers and win.

Personally I've had three instances where I lost winners finals and proceeded to win gf. If your more of an adaptive player it's a big deal. I'm sure we can find enough top level tournies (I'm no where near top level) where the same happened.

Double elimination is just better in every way (except time cost).

 

[Scythe]

The final pool format at the last FC was really awesome in person and the kishes carely planned it out so that the GFs match ended up being played last. They also ran it as pools into bracket and top 8 in the bracket(top 6 for pm) played in one last pool with any bracket scores being carried.

It was really hype but i think that was just because darkrain was in both of those pools. *shrug*

 

[Overswarm]

The final pool format at the last FC was really awesome in person and the kishes carely planned it out so that the GFs match ended up being played last. They also ran it as pools into bracket and top 8 in the bracket(top 6 for pm) played in one last pool with any bracket scores being carried.

It was really hype but i think that was just because darkrain was in both of those pools. *shrug*

I haven't done the math, but does anyone know if it is always possible to make the "GF" match of the pool last? How could we instruct TOs to do it from a set of rules? I know I could do it with deliberation, but if I couldn't tell someone standing next to me how to do it easily, it would not be a likely finish.

 

[Scythe]

I think they just had it easy since Hbox and Mango swept the pool in melee and hbox and vro swept their pool in pm

 

[Wrestlemania]

I am liking the idea of the Pools into bracket for the top 8 or whatever. I can see that being very effective at dealing with seeding but keeping the hype of the GFs. But, like most people are saying it does take a decent amount of time wit bigger numbers.