Seeding is basically bracket manipulation. You have to keep that in mind at all times.
Seeding can be IMPORTANT, but it is still pretty much bracket manipulation. You're manipulating the bracket to virtually ensure certain results; in a small, local event that's generally a bad idea.
To prevent this kind of tom foolery people typically do pools and they seed by X, where X is the number of pools they have. So if you have 64 people show up and want a bracket of 32, you know you need to cut the player base by 50%. You then choose from what pool sizes you can have:
1 pool of 64
2 pools of 32
4 pools of 16
8 pools of 8
16 pools of 4
If the actual divisions don't work out, play with the numbers a bit.
5 pools of 13 (some may have 12)
6 pools of 11 (6 x 11 is 66, so there would be 2 pools with 1 less person)
13 pools of 5
11 pools of 6
What you can choose is highly dependent on the amount of setups and what kind of bracket you're running (11 pools of 6 gives you 33 people if half get out of pools, for example).
If you usually have 12-24 man brackets I HIGHLY SUGGEST a pools only format which you can read about here:
http://smashboards.com/threads/pool...aster-than-double-elimination-bracket.324691/
Or even a Round Robin if you have enough setups!
But let's say you're dead set on doing brackets only, no pools, and you WANT seeding for whatever reason:
The issues you're going to face are:
1) the people who are ahead are likely to stay ahead; winning gets you a good seed which makes you more likely to win which gives you a better seed
2) the people who are behind have the opposite problem
3) You may have someone come into tournament 2 that is unranked. Would they fight a top seed? What if the unranked guy is Mew2King or some other stranger that is really good?
4) Many newer or bad players will get tired of playing the same matches over and over again and will be upset
To solve these problems it is generally best to do something called
limited seeding. This is typically used in circuits of tournaments that have a consistent playerbase but also a subset of rotating players that can't possibly be positively effected by seeding.
To have limited seeding you...
1) Only recognize the seeds of the top Y people, where Y is the number of byes in the bracket you will give
2) Give seeding to EVERYONE regardless of placement (assuming they are all in bracket)
3) Make the seeding competitive between placements
#1 means that if you have 24 people attend and you are putting them into a bracket, it means you have 12 matchups right away. Well what if you took the 8 players with the highest seeds out of the equation and gave them all byes? Now you have only 8 matches (16 players, unseeded, randomly placed only separated by location if applicable) and the WINNER of that match will move on to face the top 8 seeded players.
This prevents someone who has a bad seed from automatically getting wrecked by a top seed and gives the high seeded players a well deserved bye. It's a great system!
#2 Even if you go 0-2, you should get 1 point for seeding. This rewards attendance and makes seeding possible if you have an odd tournament.
#3 If 1st place gets 100 points towards seeding and 2nd gets 50, It will be impossible for 4th place to ever catch up unless there are some huge upsets. If there are huge upsets, then seeding isn't working or is ultimately irrelevant.
So how do you effectively give seeding points?
Carefully!
This is something I still need to experiment with myself so by all means make your own numbers, but my own personal theory for the next time I run a circuit will be to have any placement able to compete with the placements 2 places above it
assuming they place as well or better in the future. This means if you get 8th, the guy who got 6th won't have a huge advantage over you in seeding. This rewards "upsets" and helps make seeding more consistent and less a result of one or two tournaments.
So as an example:
1 - 25
2 - 20
3 - 15
4 - 12
5 - 10
7 - 8
9-12th - 6
13th-16th - 4
17th-24th - 2
25th-32nd - 1
The above is a (very simple) version you could use. This would mean someone who got
3rd twice would be slightly ahead of someone who got 1st
once. Someone who got
5th twice would be slightly ahead of someone who got
3rd once. The only exceptions are at the bottom, as 13th-32nd typically aren't good placements and don't indicate skill shown.
What this does is it makes variable placement exciting and worthwhile. If You get 1st (25) and I get 3rd (15), if I get 2nd next event (20) and you get 3rd (15), our scores would then be
You: 40
Me: 35
Super close despite me not winning a tournament yet, and would seed us accurately. The more consistent placements you have, the harder it will be for someone to overcome you as the gap increases.
That gap WILL occur eventually. It's generally a good idea to completely eliminate all previous seeding after a certain time. Some people take a % of the pot or a separate $X charge and tehn give it to the point leaders after so many tournaments to encourage attendance, and then reset everything after.
There's a whole lot you can do to seed effectively, but just remember that saying "That guy there is good and should win, so let's give him 1 seed" is wrong. It is bracket manipulation and completely eliminates the point of a tournament.
