Updating the wiki is a very good idea, I’d also like to see it mentioned somewhere on the tournament page too though.
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Are you assuming anyone actually knows how the tournament system currently works 
I feel like many threads have shown a big community effort to try to understand, but it’s nearly a research project in itself.
But yes one could flag it that “this is the way double elimination works”.
Maybe one could even turn the “double elimination” tournament type on the tournament pages into a clickable link pointing to the wiki.
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I think someone claimed to recently 
but I can’t find the quote now…
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RE: Title
couldn’t resist…
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Hey I was waiting for the real comments to die down before wondering what a potato double elimination contest was!!
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This thread already has more than the other two I linked, and one of them was necro’d 3 times 
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I strongly feel that in a double elimination tournament the last person standing without two losses should be the winner. I wasn’t aware how the current system here works, but this seems pretty questionable.
If in the final, the person from the loosers bracket wins - both players will have one loss. One person lost their match early in the tournament, one lost their match late in the tournament. So the person, that lost their match already early on in the tournament, should then be the overall winner over the person that lost their first match very late in the tournament?
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So I just looked through my tournaments:
“Buan” won against me.
We both won against “Go Time”.
Then I won against “Buan”.
Now I am the overall winner.
I don’t think I am more deserving of that trophy than “Buan” is.
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To me it seems like for live tournaments, it would be really boring to have to play three matches against the same player. They are long enough already!
Anyone know what happens if two players with no losses are the only ones left? (If all the losers have resigned for example.)
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How do you feel if the person that was the winner of the winners bracket actually got there because their opponents timed out or resigned from the tournament etc. Suppose the loser of the losers bracket actually had to win all of their games while the “winner” of the winners bracket just had to watch.
Is it now fair that the winner of the loser bracket has to beat this person twice?
I think I’d feel stronger if this was for a proper competition, maybe one like Kuksu Nines Title Tournament 21st Cycle, which is double elimination, or more so an IRL tournament.
But really I don’t think I’ll be in the final of any of those tournaments where it would matter, and similarly there will be much more unfairness along the way with things like the sitewide tournaments using double elimination than just how the final game is played.
Look how messy some of these real tournaments are Live 9x9 Double Elimination Tournament 2022-02-14 14:30, the amount of timeouts after two moves, resignations, byes etc. It might be better to just have some of them over quicker so the players can move onto something else.
Even this one Live 9x9 Double Elimination Tournament 2022-02-14 10:30 looks like there’s a lot of games, but the winner of the loser bracket just resigned immediately both games against the winner. Other players just dropped out/timed out.
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If you’re looking for potato DE tournaments, here are some examples:
The tournament should be balanced for the case that it runs as expected. The main goal shouldn’t be to balance it for the unexpected case over the expected case. Well the tournament would have been fair if everything went wrong, but now that things went smoothly you can’t expect it to be fair, feels like a pretty strange premise.
Sounds an awful lot like, this is going to be unfair anyways, let’s not even try to improve it.
But I do agree, under the premise that this isn’t important anyway a simple solution is fine. (This isn’t sarcasm.)
Where do you see the advantage of making the person that won all the games to the final, get kicked out on their first loss?
Also please don’t take this personally, I’m trying to talk about the tournament structure, this is in no way an attack on you. We just have a different opinion on this topic.
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I mean that’s equally a fair point. Still I think if one sets up a tournament for an ideal case, which never practically happens, it’s just nice in theory.
It’s more a critique on “the name double elimination implies you need to be eliminated twice, hence it is unfair otherwise”, and I don’t think necessarily that changing how the final game works so that it’s biased toward the winner of the winners brackets is necessarily “fair”. There’s much more at play like the pairing (slide, slaughter, random etc) and the actual way the tournaments can play out realistically. So just the notion of this is the “fairest” way I don’t think is accurate.
It also have a feeling that if the elimination method wasn’t called “double elimination” but something more abstract like McMahon or Breizh, then maybe people wouldn’t feel as strongly. If instead there was a round robin and then a final best of three, people might not complain that the best of three isn’t the usual round robin format though, which should be best of one, because the rest of the tournament was etc.
Like I said, if you view it as
it seems completely fair. It might be fairer to make the final a best of three instead, and not have the winner of the winners bracket get an advantage of playing a BO1, whereas the winner of loser bracket is playing a BO3.
Why do you think that’s fairer?
I completely agree, it would be fairly easy, especially online to try to not separate the person from the ideas, to feel attacked when disagreed with etc. It’s quite a useful reminder
All in all though, if I came online tomorrow or later today and it turned out that this
was implemented, I wouldn’t be upset about it, or feel the need to object strongly or otherwise. It’s just a decision that has to be made in the end.
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That there would be a bias, stems from your idea that the final is a seperate entity to the rest of the tournament.
You are right. Sadly fairness isn’t an absolute and is always highly dependent on perspective.
So in situations like these, I think the best solution is often the one that hurts the fewest peoples feelings.
And I think everyone getting a second chance except for the person that won all their games to the final, to me, feels like the solution that is going to hurt the most feelings out the of the proposed solutions.
- Everyone except the person that went all the way without a loss get’s a second chance. (Current system)
- Everyone gets a second chance. Period. (Double elimination)
- The double elimination path is the way to the final. The final is a bo3. (Takes more time)
- There could be different better solutions!
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If we look at actual real life games and sports with individual tournaments (I’m thinking go, chess, tennis, all of which I’m a fan) some with millions of dollars of prizes on the line, the main driving force behind each tournament is not actually to determine who the strongest player is, although they are presented that way on the surface. For 8-player casual tournaments like the DE chess tournament I cited earlier in this thread, the main motivation for playing and running them is Fun. For big tournaments with big trophies, the driving force is the entertainment of spectators, and in turn the profits for sponsors and broadcasters. Sometimes the best player wins. Sometimes they do not. In either case there is fanfare.
While discussing the results of our tournaments (we played other games besides chess and go), it was suggested that during a tournament, each game should matter. We wanted the stakes to be high for each game, because that’s more fun. Round-robin tournaments and other formats might have a higher statistical probability that the champion is the best player, but it meant that some games that are played later in the tournament don’t actually have any bearing on who wins, because some players are effectively eliminated from winning earlier on, but they are still requested to play. That wasn’t as much fun.
So I think a good double-elimination tournament strikes a nice balance between the high stakes spectacle of a single-elimination tournament and the dry statistical probability that the best player will indeed triumph in the end. To preserve that balance, I think it’s a necessity that the rising challenger from the loser’s bracket beat the winner of the winner’s bracket twice.
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Im glad i sparked such a large conversation, to me as a tournament organiser this is a big deal, i will help in whatever way possible.
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