Third place in single elimination tourneys goes to the person who lost to the eventual winner in the final.
However it seems to me that there is a case to have a play off between the two semi final losers. The match would take place in parallel to the final anyway and wouldn’t generally hold up the outcome of the tourney and the two players would not have previously met so it seems arbitrary to grant one of them the third place over the other.
An obvious possibility is that 2 dans meet in the final having played a DDK and an SDK in the semis. The DDK might end up with third place even though that is highly unlikely to be the outcome if there were a play off.
^^ This seems crazy Whether you get third place or fourth place mainly comes down to luck of the draw
^^ This is the only thing that makes sense if there is to be a third place at all. Either that, or don’t have a third place and just have winner and runner up. Third place playoff seems preferable IMO
I think this same kind of thinking is why the current (Blitz 19x19) ASTs are probably fairly inhospitable to DDK and TPK players at the moment, with slide pairing pitting people 17-20 ranks apart in an even game.
I’d be up for an overhaul of the tournament system, or if not a replacement something else side by side.
In absence of that, sure may as well have a third place playoff.
What do you do in tournaments which are either really short, or for example where most of the games are timeouts anyway?
Here’s a short one, one of the three games was a timeout so presumably you just give the third place to the person who actually played their game rather than the other semi-finalist that timed out?
Oh that was already mentioned to have happened in the current system, the third place going to a person who timed out Tournaments should show winners
What if both semi-finalists timeout? It seems silly to set up a game and have whoevers the first player timeout and become third
Hospitality to DDK / TPK could be improved by choosing a different pairing method.
The method now used is slide pairing which aims to have the strongest players play each other in later rounds. Not really fair to DDK / TPKs who get paired with much stronger opponents. No wonder they don’t bother to show up at all.
Other pairing methods are:
If we want to keep DDK / TPKs on board in ASTs adjacent pairing (“equal” strength matching) certainly is a good option (but do realise that all pairing methods have their advantages and disadvantages).
Another way of being more hospitable to DDK / TPKs is introducing a handicap system. (Some time ago I mentioned this in another thread and it caused a real shit storm.)
But since the ranking system update a few months ago I think ranking is much more balanced now, so thinking about a handicap system in ASTs might be worth considering.
Whether you get third place or fourth place mainly comes down to luck of the draw 
No trophy is better than arbitrary trophy 