One of the first articles I remember reading on Shoryuken was by one of the Cannon brothers explaining how to run a double elimination tournament. To the best of my knowledge this double elimination primer was lost when SRK crashed many years ago. This is unfortunate as it had a lot of nice tips worth knowing.
This week I’ll briefly touch upon the basics of running a double elimination tournament bracket, and then go into detail recalling some of the tips that have stuck with me from that long lost SRK article.
Thanks to the rise of free tournament applications online anyone can learn how to run a double elimination bracket by trial and error. You can even forego understanding the details and let the software do all the work for you. As such I don’t think there’s much value in me going into detail on how double elimination brackets work. If you’d like to know more about the basics you can find them on this Wikipedia page.
There are some important things you need to remember when resolving double elimination brackets. When entering players into any double elimination bracket, always fill the bracket in the order listed i.e. your first player goes into slot 1, the second into slot 2, etc. This means that any byes in the bracket will be evenly spread out, and no bye will be able to finish ahead of an actual player.
For the Grand Final of a double elimination bracket, don’t forget that the Winners bracket finalist still has 2 lives, while the Losers bracket finalist only has 1 life. This means that the Losers finalist needs to beat the Winners finalist twice in order to win the Grand Final, while the Winners finalist only has to beat the Losers finalist once to win.
When running a double elimination bracket, there are a couple of logistic things you can do to make the process more efficient. Each time you decide to start running a column from either the Winners or Losers bracket, try to run that column to completion before starting another column. It’s OK to start matches from other columns if you have resources sitting idle, but keeping the match selections organised can avoid confusion for both players and judges.
When selecting a column to run, always run a column from the Losers bracket ahead of a column from the Winners bracket. There are a few advantages to this approach. Players will be eliminated from the tournament as soon as possible, meaning they don’t have to wait around longer than necessary. Players in the Winners bracket will also have their matches spread out more evenly, avoiding the long waits that arise if you run all of the Winners bracket first. This approach also produces the best escalation in the quality of matches for spectator purposes that will (hopefully) climax with the grand final.
If you’ve ever looked at a double elimination bracket sheet you’ll notice there are directions (often letters) explaining how players are moved from the Winners bracket into the Losers bracket. What you may not have noticed is that the letters are arranged to reduce the likelihood of double jeopardy arising. Double jeopardy refers to any situation where 2 players that have played each other in the Winners bracket are matched up again in the Losers bracket. It’s generally considered “poor form” to have players face each other twice in the same double elimination tournament unless there’s no other choice (e.g. only 2 players remaining).
In practice even the directions on a well-designed double elimination bracket cannot guarantee there won’t be a double jeopardy scenario. If double jeopardy arises the organiser can opt to swap the Losers bracket entry points in a single column to try and avoid the double jeopardy. If you’re in doubt or inexperienced I’d recommend just playing things out as stated on the bracket. Note that Evo never floats players in a bracket under any circumstances, preferring to ignore the double jeopardy matter entirely.
The main thing to note is that double jeopardy should be rare if you’re using well designed bracket sheets.
BSG Example – Running a Double Elimination Bracket
Here’s a simple example using the BSG. I’ve started out with the same 16 players as last week, but this time I’ve set the “Minimum Pools” to 1 and just used random seeding (i.e. no ranked seeds in the “Seed” column and “Region Seeding” set to “Off”). After clicking “Generate Brackets” I have a single pool of 16 players on the “Pool_A” sheet.
To run the bracket in the BSG, fill the wins into the blue boxes on the bracket sheet. The games needed to win is determined by the “Games per Match” setting on the “Control” sheet. Here it’s a best 2-out-of-3 tournament, so any time a player has 2 wins they’ll automatically be advanced.
The BSG reminds you to run 2 sets in the Grand Final where required. Full results are generated automatically in the yellow table to the right of the bracket.
You can download a worked example with all the results already filled in. If you’d like to run one from scratch you can “Unlock” the BSG and generate a fresh bracket via the “Control” sheet.
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 –[
