This week we have a guest writer for the Bracketed blog series. JBHewitt is the founder of LanSmash, an organisation that runs video game meets and tournaments in Brisbane. He’s been very busy in 2011, between LanSmash events and travelling around Australia to help run fighting game tournaments as part of the ACL Pro circuit.
JB has been experimenting with Swiss brackets for fighting game tournaments. In this week’s article he shares his thoughts on why the Swiss system has benefits to offer the fighting game community.
Swiss Style for Players
AwesomeSauce is a new player who’s new to Street Fighter and has found there is a local meet-up happening near her.
She rocks up to the meet and enters the tournament knowing that she’s going to be smashed by the more experienced players. No matter, she’s going to test her metal; mashing wakeup shoryuken usually works from her online experience!
Disappointingly, AwesomeSauce is knocked out of the tournament after just two games! She doesn’t know what happened and can’t quite understand how she was punished so hard by that *INSERT LOCAL TOWN* uppercut. She leaves the tournament and consoles herself to a pint of the finest chocolate ice cream, never to return to her local meet… those guys were all jerks anyway.
AwesomeSauce put that chocolate down!
AwesomeSauce is a fictional character, but to me she’s the newest player to join my local scene. How can we encourage more gamers like AwesomeSauce to stick around and join our group? Casual sessions prior to tournaments are great but they don’t give the same level of play or emotions as a tournament match.
Whilst we can’t afford to give out free Fighting magazine subscriptions at our events, we can at least try and ease players in with a different tournament format!
What’s wrong with Double Elimination?
Double Elim is here to stay. There is nothing that can replace the raw emotions of a knock-out double elimination style event. Part of what makes Double Elim so good is that it is a brutal tournament style. It’s a style that quickly weeds out the weak from the strong and makes for a fast tournament.
Fast tournaments, however, aren’t required for every event, especially at local, meet-ups where the atmosphere may be more relaxed.
Can Swiss bring back AwesomeSauce?
What new players want is more experience, more games, and more fun. Swiss helps with this because instead of potentially two matches and you’re out there is a preset number of matches for each tournament. It doesn’t matter if you’re the Number 1 or (like me) Number 41, everyone in a Swiss tournament plays the same number of matches.
The magic of Swiss is that as the rounds progress it tries to pair players of equal skill. I know a Swiss bracket is working when at the end of the tournament I play one of the very worst other players on the day. 
This means that players have a better chance of improving at a tournament level. Rather then being pitted against some of the best players they have more of a fighting chance, and the opportunity to claw back some reputation.
I’m sold! Let’s try this crazy thing!
I wrote this little piece from the eye of a gamer. I’ve found that most players don’t understand the complexities of Double Elim, such as the importance of seeding and the odds of winning if you lose your first match. To be fair, most players don’t need to know. They just need to know who they’re playing against and where they stand in the rankings. Rest assured that whilst at first Swiss might seem complicated it’s fairly straight forward once you get a feel for it.
The LanSmash crew has been running these styles of tournaments for over a year in Brisbane events, and even taken the format on the road with the ACL Pro circuit 2011 circuit to good effect. So next time you’re planning a tournament for a local meet, take a moment and consider whether Swiss is worth a try.
-=JBHewitt=-
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 –[
