Tournament-running colour charts, scoresheets & instruct

[Niall]

Are you running a tournament?

Do you want to display the brackets for everyone to look at and check themselves, without constantly pestering you with "Who am I playing against next", "When's my next match" or "How long until I play again"?

Do you want insurance against any laptop virus, laptop lack of appropriate software, or sudden lack of laptop when one promised to be there? Or just don't have a laptop?

Then feel free to use my Unpatented Bracket Sheets!
- For up to 16 players
- For 17 to 32 players
- For 33 to 64 players
- plus general Qualifiers Scoring sheet
- and now with brand new Results Scoring sheets for ITG or DDR SuperNova!

NOTE: all brackets are considered to use the common 1 vs last, 2 vs second-last etc style of play.

Use the Qualifiers sheet to post clearly the seedings obtained, by score. Later you can fill in the ranks as well.

Fully colour-coordinated by Round! Made to be printed at 11x17, though you can probably read it at 8.5x11 too. Barely. In case of Byes, plug in the names in the brackets, cross off the matches not played, and cross them off again on the order of matches page. You'll know exactly where you are!

Each bracket PDF also has a sheet indicating the order of matches, colour-coordinated with the boxes on the bracket sheet.

Rounds are indicated at the bottom. There's a space there to write in any round cap ("5-9", "6-10", "6+" for Summer in Toronto, etc).

Start with the middle column of white boxes; plug in the names by seed; anything empty is a bye.

Every match has a letter-number ID; the order of matches is First round of all, 2nd round winners, 2nd round losers A then B, etc. Losers go both sections of their rounds at once.

Print out the Results sheets, on letter-size cardstock if you can for best results, cut as appropriate, and fill them out as the tournament goes along! Can fit in the palm of your hand (well, my hand at any rate) for easy score taking. I circle the winner to make it really obvious who's leading. Works for ITG and DDR SuperNova as both can use percentage scores. After a tournament, it's supremely easy to go through match by match and do a writeup.

Any questions? Ask away!

[Niall]

User Manual for Bracket Sheets

It looks like some people have had trouble with using my colour bracket sheets, so I decided to make a little guide in order to make sure people use them correctly. I've also put afterwards some notes on the concepts behind double-elimination tournaments in general.

Tournament Brackets Guide

A few notes to keep in mind beforehand:
- all rounds are colour-coded;
- you should not have byes past the second round;
- note carefully where the losers of the winners bracket matches end up in the losers brackets; the grey boxes have the match ID in them to say where the person comes from;
- the idea is to not have people face each other twice until near the finals, or play twice in a row until the finals.

1- Go through the qualifiers (you can use the Qualifiers Scoring sheets).

2- Write the names in the 1st round white boxes; the number corresponds to the seeding order.

3- Cross out all remaining blank boxes; those are the "byes" (as in, the person waves bye-bye to others as they automatically move to a higher bracket).

4- Treat all byes as automatic losses; write the names as appropriate in the winners bracket, and cross out the corresponding losers bracket space. (If you have lots of byes, you may have two facing each other in the losers bracket; just mark the winner as a bye since there's still no one competing.)

5- Start the first round matches, top to bottom.

6- Continue to second and later rounds, alternating between Winners and Losers brackets. Important: there are TWO columns of losers brackets to go through for each column of winners bracket. (If the first column of losers has no matches because of byes, go straight to the second column.)

7- While a match is underway, prepare the next one: call the competitors, determine pad and song choices, and ask them to think already about the first song. This saves time taken between matches and can shave off hours in 16- and 32-bracket matches.

8- You may want to have a small break between the winner of the losers bracket and the finals, but no more than 5 minutes (one match's time).

9- Finals: to win the tournament, the winners bracket finalist must win one match; but the losers bracket finalist must win two, as they must make the winners finalist (who has not lost a match yet) lose twice to be eliminated, just like everyone else.

That's it!

The majority of your attention should be spent on enforcing round caps, mod rules, traffic flow, herding the next contestants, and any other rules about your tournament (e.g. are finals best 3 out of 5, etc). There should never be a question of "who goes next against whom" as the brackets take care of that.

You may also use the handy Scorekeeping Sheets, but only if you're using straight percentages as winning conditions (ITG or SuperNova). Any special DP scoring will need special sheets for you to calculate. It's often best to write down quickly and calculate after, especially if the machine doesn't have the unlimited timer. Or take a screenshot with a digicam you can consult seconds later for official scorekeeping.



Why Double Elimination (DE)?

The principle of DE is to give players a second chance; results can often be so close that the better player may not immediately win. Also seeding often does not result in the final ranking - though it should be close to it. (If seed 17 gets 1st place, they may have sandbagged during qualifiers.) We all know we can have a single shitty match, while being great elsewhere. This should not result in immediate disqualification. You must lose twice to be eliminated, thus the name.

DE is used for many major sports tournaments, as well as a lot of chance-related events, especially where large sums are involved. The method used here is the one that Poker players use, and they are quite meticulous about fairness of conduct.

The principle of having two rounds of losers for each round of winners is that first, all losers of the previous losers bracket round go against each other, then they play against the loser of the corresponding winners bracket round. You must finish a full round with the same number of people in each bracket ready to compete in the next round.

The initial seed pairing used in these brackets is what is called "Modified Swiss-Style Pairing" used in a number of skill-based events. It's also known as "First versus Last". (The true Swiss-style pairing is top of first half vs top of second half; in a bracket of 8, it would be 1 vs 5, 2 vs 6, 3 vs 7 and 4 vs 8.) This usually allows the top seeds to get far enough to end up competing against each other at some point. But at the current level of DDR and ITG play, when seeding in some songs gets half the competitors within 2% of each other, "upsets" (lower seed winning) are quite possible. This can change a lot, though, if certain unknown elements are added in for sight-reading (new game, customs songs or modded steps never seen before).

In such a pairing, ideally the top seed should win, and all along the winners bracket you should always find this "first vs last". Therefore only the finals of the winners bracket should find seeds 1 and 2 pitted against each other, not in round 1. If you need to recreate the brackets from scratch, working backwards, one can fill all the necessary numbers to find which seeds go where in the first round. (Some specific positioning may change, but that only changes the order of the matches, not who plays against who.)

Another reason to use Modified Swiss Pairing is to simplify the byes; with regular Swiss pairing, if you had 12 players in a 16 bracket, seeds 1-4 would play against seeds 9-12 while seeds 5-8 would automatically advance; this does not seem very fair. The bye system is much more complex in those tournaments. As well, this kind of pairing is meant for full Swiss tournaments, where everyone plays everyone else. (This is why it's called "swiss-style" pairing, as elimination tournaments like ours only use their pairing method for initial placement in the grid.)

The goal is also to not have people facing each other again until very late in the tournament. It's no fun to always play the same people! This is why the losers in the winners bracket get a different placement in the losers bracket. If they were in a 'high' match in round 2 (B1), they get to the 'low' section of the losers matches (F16 for the 32-bracket chart). In the next round, you switch it again, and keep switching the order to mix people up in the losers bracket. The specific logic changes for each number of brackets as to how they go, but it makes sense once you study it.

There are many types of double-elimination tournaments, but this is the quickest and easiest one to use for rhythm dance games. You must allow some time between matches for contentious issues now and then, and for players missing, and other unforeseen events; but generally you can calculate at least minimum times for the number of players present. Once you know how many are playing and have taken care of all the byes, you can count the number of matches, assign 8 to 9 minutes per match, and announce an approximate end time before even the first match is started! You can even take five minutes to calculate how much time each round will take; so when the first winner of a round is determined, you can tell them how long they have until their next match. (They can take a break, go eat, or something, especially in the early rounds. They can also not bitch because they'll know in advance about the wait.)

The minimum (or ideal, if you want) time for a tournament with filled brackets is:
- 8 people: 2 hours
- 16 people: 5 hours
- 32 people: 9.5 hours

When planning tournaments, this is crucial to keep in mind. This does not take into account any announcements, machine repairs, special setups, etc - strictly the tournament matches.

I hope this clarifies the way tournaments are generally run, and how my brackets are used. And remember, this is supposed to be fun for everyone, you included! In fact, once you have enough people who know the system, the tournament is almost running itself... almost.

[Crono]

Thanks for this, it's a good idea to have sitting around.

Though, I should mention that sometimes you can toy a little with your time if, say, 5 hours for 16 people is too much, you could cut the format down to each player picks 1 song and that's it, making for two song matches which'll probably cut off a good hour-hour and a half in the end. (I've tried this format before, it turned out a lot better than I thought it would, actually)

Conversely, if you go higher # of songs, the times change too...pretty common sense, but I thought I'd mention both ways since it can be a good way to tweak times.

[CaptainObvious]

Bump.

[Mazrim]

Why exactly does this need a bump?