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Swiss style tournaments should be the new Smash standard

Kal

Smash Champion
Joined
Dec 21, 2004
Messages
2,974
Swiss over Round Robin seems obvious to me for creating a bracket. I don't think Swiss should replace the bracket, since part of the excitement of a tournament is watching the Grand Finals, but I do think using Swiss to determine the bracket is a good idea.
 

HyugaRicdeau

Baller/Shot-caller
Joined
Jun 4, 2003
Messages
3,883
Location
Portland, OR
Slippi.gg
DRZ#283
I have run a few ~32 man Swiss tournaments, all entirely by hand (or excel). I had a system worked out in my head beforehand so it didn't take too long to do the actual figuring out of who plays whom, and with software I'm sure the setup time is negligible. But I'm not a huge fan of Swiss for reasons that follow:

The point Kish was making about Swiss being like a single elim bracket but where eliminated players keep playing I think refers to the following effect: There is a score cutoff for winning (or making it to the bracket), and if your score is under the cutoff by more than the number of matches left, you are practically eliminated. Unless you have a surfeit of stations, this eats up time (and even if you do, it eats up friendly time). You could just have a player be out once he loses X number of times, but that makes it even more like a bracket and kind of kills the point of Swiss. Running Swiss into bracket will almost certainly cancel out any time savings and probably actually make it longer; even an 8-man bracket takes either 6 or 7 rounds to decide, which is easily over an hour for Melee (and can approach 2 for Brawl).

There is also the fact that you can 'game the system,' in a way, by losing matches early on. For a 32-man Swiss, you need 5 rounds; if you go into an 8-man bracket, the cutoff will be 3 to make it to bracket. Ostensibly everyone with 2 pts is equal, but in my experience, the people who go 0-2 and then 2-0 are a level below people who go 2-0 and then 0-2, and this makes it possible for lesser skilled (or system-gaming) people to sneak into the bracket if they get a generous matchup round 5. This is correctable by having more rounds, but then the time advantage (to the extent that there is one) disappears. I guess this isn't so much gaming the system as me expressing a lack of confidence that Swiss produces accurate results beyond the top 1/8th of the bracket (and I guess conversely, the bottom 1/8), which is supposed to be the advantage of Swiss.

Then when you do make the bracket, tiebreak issues come up, because the scores don't cutoff neatly into powers of 2. There aren't easy ways to do tiebreaks in Swiss because there isn't going to be a common set of opponents between the tied players. Again using the 32-into-8 example from earlier, you can end up with 1 person at 5, 3 people at 4, and 5 people at 3. You now have a 5-way tie for 4 spots. The way to break this tie is usually by 'strength of schedule,' which is for the most part random, and not very satisfying, especially when you have only 5 rounds.

Also, I think scrubs tend to enjoy playing tournament sets against good players more than they do against other scrubs. In a RR pool, people get to play against a variety of skill. With Swiss, except for maybe the first, scrubs are relegated to scrubdom basically for the rest of the tournament.

Oh yeah, and if you have an odd number of participants, you either have to get one person to leave or get another to join.
 

Pi

Smash Hero
Joined
Feb 5, 2008
Messages
6,038
Location
Lake Mary, Florida
zoro here in fl has been using this program that does swiss
but w/ some added features
like
it factors in how well your opponents are performing, and that adds to your points
so ties aren't an issue
and it also doesn't give you a definitive 'oh i've lost x amount of games there's no way i can get into bracket now'

because let's say you're, for all intensive purposes, a 7th place player
and first round you lose to 1st place player
he's going to tear through the rest of the opponents, so losing to him vs. losing to say a 9th place player, is going to affect your score differently

this also would prevent the 'gaming the system' because if you lose early on to bad players, it's going to affect your score more heavily than if you lose early on to players who are legit better than you

and vise versa w/ beating bad players, you gain less from 2-0ing bad players than you gain from 2-0ing good players
 

HyugaRicdeau

Baller/Shot-caller
Joined
Jun 4, 2003
Messages
3,883
Location
Portland, OR
Slippi.gg
DRZ#283
OK, I think that probably does deal with the problem of gaming the system, but the point I made about the unsatisfactory nature of the tiebreak still bears. You're still using strength of schedule as the tiebreak, it's just that instead of applying the tiebreak at the end, it's continuously being applied as you play because you get more/less points for playing better/worse players. So people with the same record still have ties broken essentially by luck of the draw of who they got to play. In an RR pool, everyone has the same opponents in common so set records are directly comparable.
 

Qual_

Smash Apprentice
Joined
Mar 6, 2010
Messages
162
Location
France - Strasbourg
i am not sure that i have understand about Swiss tournament system, but if you are good, and deliberately losing the first match, you will go easier further in tournament ?

Edit : Oh.. ok Thanks 3
 

Pi

Smash Hero
Joined
Feb 5, 2008
Messages
6,038
Location
Lake Mary, Florida
OK, I think that probably does deal with the problem of gaming the system, but the point I made about the unsatisfactory nature of the tiebreak still bears. You're still using strength of schedule as the tiebreak, it's just that instead of applying the tiebreak at the end, it's continuously being applied as you play because you get more/less points for playing better/worse players. So people with the same record still have ties broken essentially by luck of the draw of who they got to play. In an RR pool, everyone has the same opponents in common so set records are directly comparable.
pools weren't exactly w/o conflict though either, granted you can break it down to a specif way of doing things like sets over matches over head to head or w/e

but i've been in situations where a person has forfeited the rest of his pools matches, or played poorly or sandbagged on purpose becaues they knew they would make it out which affected results and caused results to be unfavorable
 

HyugaRicdeau

Baller/Shot-caller
Joined
Jun 4, 2003
Messages
3,883
Location
Portland, OR
Slippi.gg
DRZ#283
pools weren't exactly w/o conflict though either, granted you can break it down to a specif way of doing things like sets over matches over head to head or w/e

but i've been in situations where a person has forfeited the rest of his pools matches, or played poorly or sandbagged on purpose becaues they knew they would make it out which affected results and caused results to be unfavorable
Yes, pools do have certain disadvantages, and we have to weigh them against those of Swiss. I'd rather deal with a few isolated incidents like that (which do still affect Swiss albeit to a lesser degree) than to have systematic issues like the ones I brought up.
 

Bones0

Smash Legend
Joined
Aug 31, 2005
Messages
11,153
Location
Jarrettsville, MD
I never understood pools the way they are now. People are seeded into pools, so that (for the first round at least) it's easy to predict the order people will be in. The last pool I played in was at Zenith. I had a 5-man pool, top 3 advance. I get ***** 2-0 by ChuDat and Mr. F, then 2-0 Dark Peach and strawhats. Dark Peach beats Mr. F 2-1, so I am eliminated by tie breaker. I payed entry and didn't even get to play anyone that close to my skill level.

Not whining, though. My point is simply that pools on serve to reinforce the original seeding. It doesn't really affect the tournament except for a few pools that have two top players in them who have to fight for the top seed. All the other players know who they will win against and who they will lose against. In Swiss, I'm practically guaranteed to get a few matches that are 2-1 sets, which helps people improve a lot more than the alternative.
 

=ArtH=

Smash Apprentice
Joined
Nov 13, 2005
Messages
173
I've been playing in tourneys since like 02 and I've always hated pools. Swiss will always be superior.
 

Rubyiris

Smash Hero
Joined
Apr 19, 2007
Messages
6,033
Location
Tucson, AZ.
@Hyuga: You use "Byes" to counter odd numbered people. The person with a Bye gets an automatic win, but gets +0 to their tie breakers.

:\

The way Yugioh breaks ties is as following:

The tiebreaker system is made up of 3 different tiebreakers, which work as follows:

T1 -- the most important tiebreaker, is the combined win/loss record of the people you played against. For example, let's say there are 8 rounds. The 8 people you played against went 6-2, 7-1, 5-3, 4-4, 4-4, 3-5, 5-3, and 6-2.

6 minus 2 is 4, so each of the 6-2s add a +4 to the tiebreaker.
7 minus 1 is 6, so the 7-1 you'd played against would add a +6.

Basically, add up all of their wins, subtract all of their losses, and that would be the total. In that case, it's a +16.


T2 -- the tiebreaker that's only used if two people's T1s are the same -- are the combined T1s of everyone your T1s played against. So out of the 8 people you played against, if THEIR T1s are +8, +10, +13, +2, -3, -10, 0, and +6, that would add up to +26, which would be your T2.


T3 -- the sum of the squares of the rounds in which you lost.
So if you didn't lose any rounds, your T3 would be 0, but it wouldn't matter because no one could be tied with you.

If you only lost one round, take the number of that round, and multiply it by itself. (So if your one loss was in Round 7, your T3 would be 49.)

Also; the software they used, Mantis, can be found online with a little bit of digging.

We've been using this system in AZ to success.
 

BigD!!!

Smash Lord
Joined
Aug 13, 2009
Messages
1,833
i see that the tiebreakers do actually work, but i still feel like its based on things that are too unrelated to your own performance

it may be more accurate, but in my experience people dont like having no idea if they are going to make bracket or not and then being told they didnt along with a really long explanation involving players they didnt even play
 

Rubyiris

Smash Hero
Joined
Apr 19, 2007
Messages
6,033
Location
Tucson, AZ.
it mostly involves how good the people you're going to play. The people this affects usually aren't the people who are going to make it anyways. Since you generally start playing people close to your level, the higher leveled players don't have to worry about their ties most of the time.

The people who do generally don't have any business up there anyways LOL.
 

ranmaru

Smash Legend
Joined
Feb 10, 2008
Messages
13,297
Switch FC
SW-0654 7794 0698
BUMPPPPPPPPPPPPP.


I wonder if you could write smartphone/android apps, that correspond with the program ur writing for the TO's computer.

At least one person in each pool will have a smartphone (either iphone or android) and then they could see what match to play next and plug it into that instead which would avoid that problem I forsee happening with people coming up to the TO desk all the time to see who they play next. That person could also be the "pool leader". Sorry for the wall of text lol.
Anyways. I think you have made an app before right? Maybe you can make one? :awesome: Jk. But if someone did, they would also have to account on what to do if the app failed to connect to the software half way through or something.

If an app like this were made, I'm sure plenty of smashers would get it. Course, I'm prepared to do all the work. Plus I'm not going to have friendlies.

Also, awesome WoT man. I'm going to use that to introduce Swiss to my next tournament. I'm gonna learn it to be prepared and everything.
 

Purpletuce

Smash Lord
Joined
Jan 3, 2012
Messages
1,316
Location
Corvallis, OR
I definately support this, and I believe it would greatly benefit players of lower skill, and represent rankings more thoroughly.
 
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