[Official 2005 Game Design] Radical Tournament Ideas

[Andrew]

Another Tournament Structure Idea

Ditch the qualifying, alliance selection, etc entirely.

Maintain the 2v2 format.

Go with a fully deterministic n-loss elimination bracket, where n depends on the number of teams at the tournament.

Start by randomly assigning all teams at the tournament to a position in the opening bracket. Assign byes to each bracket based on the number of teams in the tournament.

The mechanism...
Two teams play against two teams.
The winning alliance moves to the next level in the current bracket, but the alliance members are split.
The losing alliance drops to the next bracket, at the current level of that bracket.

If a team loses n times, it is eliminated.

The winners of the n brackets play into a single elimination tournament to determine the eventual winner. For large numbers of teams, you would have to have fewer than 8 brackets. But, you could terminate the loser's bracket play early. For instance, the winner of the first loser's bracket would be the second seeded alliance and the loser of the first loser's bracket would be the third seeded alliance.

Final alliances are determined "randomly" by how you end up in your bracket. Ie no alliance selections.

Let's say you have 40 teams at an event.

The winners bracket would be 5 levels
40 teams (10 matches)->20 teams (5 matches)->10 teams (2 matches + 2 byes) -> 6 teams (1 match + 2 byes) -> 4 teams (1 match) -> winner 1

The first loser's bracket would be 7 levels
20 teams (5 matches)->20 teams (5 matches)->14 teams (3 matches + 2 byes)->10 teams (2 matches + 2 byes)->8 teams (2 matches)->6 teams (one match + 2 byes)->4 teams (1 match) -> winner 2

The second loser's bracket would be 8 levels
10 teams (2 matches + 2 byes)->6+10 teams (4 matches)->8+6 teams (3 matches + 2 byes)->6+2+4 teams (3 matches)->6+4 teams (2 matches + 2 byes)->4+2+2 teams (2 matches)->4+2 teams (1 match + 2 byes)->4 teams (1 match) -> winner 3

This can be continued into the third, fourth, fifth, sixth, and seventh loser's bracket.

Although this looks complicated (and I probably made a mistake or two), it is algorithmic and can be programmed without much effort. The result being, with N teams and n losses (where n is ideally 8), you can figure out how many matches are required, what teams get byes at each level, etc.

If you play the first round, then the first loser's round, then the second loser's round, etc. Then resume with the second round, the second first loser's round, etc., you automatically get the desirable "time between matches" match spacing.

This tournament structure would have two corollary benefits.

The teams which are going to "lose out" would be eliminated fairly early. This would give them time to work on their robots for the next competition or enjoy the rest of this competition. In other words, if you go 0-8, you'll be all done by about 2:00 on the first day, having played in the first round of each bracket.

On the other hand, the suspense for this tournament would build as you approach the winners of the brackets. The top seed would be spat out first, followed by the second seed, etc.

You could even have a team go 4-0 early in the first day, only to lose the winner's bracket final. This team (4-1) could potentially play (and lose) in all of the bracket finals.

Another wrinkle, to retain alliance selection, the eight alliances could pick a third partner for final eliminations. Since neither alliance partner would be "captain" this would require considerable cooperation between the two.