Over the last 10 years tournament organisers have become increasingly proficient at managing double elimination tournaments with large numbers of competitors. Since Evolution started using double elimination pools to resolve brackets with hundreds of players, it has become common to see other large events use a similar format, with varying degrees of success.

This week I’ll talk about bracket sizes in double elimination tournaments. I’ll discuss why 64-player brackets and larger are bad and how to avoid using them entirely.

Whenever an organiser predetermines the number of pools they plan on using, there’s an inclination to stick to this no matter how many people enter the tournament. This is the most common reason for 64-player brackets, or larger, coming into use. Brackets larger than 32-players seem innocent enough until you actually try to run them. Once the bracket is underway, 3 major problems arise.

• i) Long waiting times between matches.
  Waiting for your next match is like being in a queue. Nobody likes being in a long queue. The larger the bracket you use, the longer the wait between matches will become, and the greater the chance that people will not wait around patiently for their next match to be called.
• ii) Running out of playable matches.
  If you have a lot of players in the bracket you can speed things up considerably by adding more setups. However at some point every 64-player bracket is reduced to 32 remaining players, and from then on a lot of those extra setups don’t offer anything. If setups reserved for tournaments spend a long time sitting idle, organisers and attendees aren’t getting the most out of the setups available.
• iii) The “bracket update” bottleneck.
  Even if you have extra setups and staff to manage that 64-player bracket, the results still need to be fed back into a single bracket sheet. There are only so many updates you can process into the bracket at a given time. If you have too many matches being resolved at once you’ll still face delays as that information is fed back into a single administrative choke-point.

Recent examples of the pain induced by using excessively large brackets include SSF4 at EVO 2010 and SSF4:AE at Shadowloo Showdown 2011. SS2011 used 64-player pools while EVO 2010 had 128-player pools. Players were forced to wait up to 3 hours between matches in their pool. At SS there were plenty of times where at least 30% of the tournament setups sat unused. Schedules blew out as a result of the delays caused by using excessively large brackets.

The solution is simple: never use a bracket larger than 32-players. If you have more than 32 players, use double elimination pools to resolve the first round of your tournament. After resolving all pools, if you still have more than 32 players in the tournament, break the remaining players into pools and repeat the process until you only need 1 “finals” bracket to complete the tournament. I’ll explain how to correctly run a double elimination tournament via pools in a future article.

The only downside of using pools is that incidents of double jeopardy increase i.e. situations where players face each other twice before the end of the tournament. I think the benefits to everyone vastly outweigh the shortcomings. At EVO APAC 4 pools of 32-player brackets kept the SSF4 tournament on time. Each pool was run in under 2 hours using 5 setups. At EVO 2011 all pools are capped at 16 players in order to run each pool in 1-2 hours. Keeping pools short and on-time leaves competitors free to get more out of their time at a tournament.

BSG Example – Generating Pools
Try using the BSG to prepare the brackets for a large tournament. Grab a copy of the BSG and on the “Control” sheet set the “Minimum Pools” to 1. Click the “Generate Brackets” button to seed the tournament. The BSG will automatically divide the sample list of players into evenly sized double elimination pools. You will find the pools on sheets “Pool_A”, “Pool_B”, etc.

It’s impossible to end up with a 64-player bracket via the BSG, because the BSG doesn’t even include brackets larger than 32-players. So when using the BSG to seed your brackets you’ll always have manageable pool sizes no matter how many people turn up.

Feedback and Future Articles
If you have any feedback about this article, or would like to request a subject for a future Bracketed article, you can send me a PM or an email, or make a post in the Bracketed Feedback thread on the OzHadou forums.

]– Ziggy –[