An Analysis of Tournament Structure
This work addresses tournament design problems for organizers and participants, but it is incremental as it builds on existing tournament analysis methods.
This paper analyzes tournament structures to determine the best one based on cost, competitiveness, and ranking precision, finding that single elimination is best for qualifying one winner, double elimination for multiple winners, and round-robin for reliable ranking but high cost.
This paper explores a novel way for analyzing the tournament structures to find a best suitable one for the tournament under consideration. It concerns about three aspects such as tournament conducting cost, competitiveness development and ranking precision. It then proposes a new method using progress tree to detect potential throwaway matches. The analysis performed using the proposed method reveals the strengths and weaknesses of tournament structures. As a conclusion, single elimination is best if we want to qualify one winner only, all matches conducted are exciting in term of competitiveness. Double elimination with proper seeding system is a better choice if we want to qualify more winners. A reasonable number of extra matches need to be conducted in exchange of being able to qualify top four winners. Round-robin gives reliable ranking precision for all participants. However, its conduction cost is very high, and it fails to maintain competitiveness development.