Merging Knockout and Round-Robin Tournaments: A Flexible Linear Elimination Tournament Design
This work addresses the need for more adaptable tournament designs in competitive settings, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing formats.
The authors tackled the problem of designing a flexible tournament structure by combining knockout and round-robin formats, resulting in a linear elimination design that can adapt to any number of players and matches while satisfying desirable properties for selecting winners and ranking participants.
We propose a new tournament structure that combines the popular knockout tournaments and the round-robin tournaments. As opposed to the extremes of divisive elimination and no elimination, our tournament aims to eliminate the participants as linearly as possible as a form of subtractive elimination. Our design is flexible in the sense that it can be adapted to any number of players $N$ and any number of matches $M$. Our design satisfies many properties that are desirable for a tournament to select a winner and can be adapted to rank all the participating players.