Simple Tournament Formats

Sometimes you need to run a tournament – I’m looking at you, first-time Champion of a Shire. See my previous article for an broad overview on types of tournaments. Herein, I will explain some relevant basic vocabulary, and then a few strategies for running tournaments that require minimal logistics and planning experience.

 

Vocabulary

Bouts vs Eliminations

A single instance of two fighters hitting each other a bunch is a bout. We usually describe it as “Best X of Y”, e.g. “best 2 out of 3”, meaning, we fight until someone has won twice, and simultaneous kills count as nothing – winner of 2 advances. That is a whole bout. It is normal for most bracket-based tournaments to be best-2-of-3 for most bouts, and best-3-of-5 of final for the final 1 or 2 rounds. An X-elimination format means you must be defeated in X bouts to be eliminated from the entire tournament.

Reeves, Heralds, Marshals, Bean Counters

A Reeve (Amtgard), Herald (Belegarth/Dagorhir), or Marshal (SCA) is a referee who (1) knows the rules, (2) can stand next to a fight and go “no, you got hit there, you died”, and (3) often wears yellow or carries a long striped stick. Those titles are largely interchangeable, though I will often default to Reeve. A bean counter is someone who does not necessarily actually judge fights, but records results of bouts on paper and does addition.

Rings

A ring is a spot where people fight a bout. You probably will not actually mark a ring on the ground, nor have hard boundaries to the fighting zone. It may not even stay in the same place (but it’s helpful if it does). Each ring should have a reeve or set of reeves that control the fight and report the score to the tournament organizer. The number of rings is usually the bottleneck to tournament seed – two rings means twice as many fights as one ring.

Seeding

When it is known that a number of entrants are of high skill, common practice is to strategically place them on a constructed bracket. In other words, they are “seeded” at specific intervals in the list. Places with advanced history may calculate “seed points” based on previous tournament performance, or just consider previous wins at the same annual tournament. Places which can remember scaling awards for fighting prowess (Amtgard) can also simply count the people with the biggest number. Different tournament formats will do different things to seeded players.

Easy Formats

Other common formats, such as Texas Two-Step or Swiss, have logistical or administrative challenges that require significant setup or organizer effort. Traditional brackets are the easiest to administer.

Seeded Single Elimination

Structured brackets function by putting two players in a bout, and one player leaves. Each round eliminates half the players. For this reason, fully structured brackets must be of a power of two size, e.g. 8 or 16 starting slots. A tournament with a different number of entrants (most tournaments) must use  bracket of the next larger size, and fill the remaining slots with “byes”. When an player’s opponent is a bye, the player automatically “wins” and proceeds to the next round. Generally, byes should be assigned either randomly (if the overall seed assignment is random) or to the top seeded players, i.e. treated as if the bye is a lowest seed.

Fully Seeded

Usually, seeding is for placing high-skill players at specified points in a tournament bracket. If all of your players are of a specific known level – which is usually the case during the second stage of a tournament where the first stage creates the seeding – you can seed the entire bracket.

Fully seeded, 8 person bracket

Fully seeded, 8 person bracket

Partially Seeded

Many times, however, you only know that a few players are far ahead of the others. You can partially seed a bracket by placing the few high-skill players as per normal seed rules, then just filling up the rest of the bracket with the rest of the names in no particular order.

8 person bracket, partially seeded with 3 top players

8 person bracket, partially seeded with 3 top players

In this case, 3 of the players were known to be higher skill than the other 5, so they were seeded into the bracket far from each other according to normal seed rules. Then, the other 5 players were arbitrarily assigned seed spots.

Arbitrarily Seeded

If you don’t wish to seed any players by number – either to simply avoid the emotional/administrative labor of ranking players by skill, or because the whole field is of roughly equal skill or simply unknown to you – you can simply fill in all the boxes with names. Even though the seeding is arbitrary and pseudorandom, it is useful because everyone’s names and the bouts are written down from the start. You have created an instructional guide for yourself – just call up the next pair of names when a ring is open. Players can wander off and mingle between fights, and you won’t lose track of who still needs to fight whom.

8 person, arbitrarily seeded bracket with no clear outliers.

8 person, arbitrarily seeded bracket with no clear outliers.

Notice that I filled in the same names in a different pattern than above. It is good to not fill in the names the same way if you are running multiple brackets with the same group of people in one day. It is more interesting for the players to not fight the same people in the same order every time.

Unseeded Single Elimination

You can also opt to not do any seeding at all. Rather than fully diagramming out the progress of the tournament from start to finish, you will virtually create the structure of a bracket in your mind. The advantage of this strategy is that you do not need to do any upfront administration: counting players, drawing a bracket on paper, getting everyone’s names, etc. It also allows you to easily ignore players who leave partway, or choosing exactly who gets a bye in a round. The disadvantage of this format is that it requires you to keep all the players in place, and it is much more difficult to track intermediate results.

Instruct the entrants to stand in a line, and stay in line (the head of the line is in front of the tournament organizer). Simply grab the two players at the front of the line, and send them to the next available ring. Winner goes back to the end of the line. Loser leaves. Repeat until the line is empty. If your tournament requires you to track placements, such as 1st through 3rd, you will need to stop the line when there are 4 people remaining, and explicitly set up, record, and direct the players. Usually, the number of rings will reduce so more reeves can watch the fewer, but more important fights. 

Overhead view of unseeded single bracket. Players A-H (red) are lined up before tournament organizer (green) O, who directs them to one of two rings with reeves (blue) R1 and R2. Bracket below shows the equivalent bracket being approximated by the queue.

Overhead view of unseeded single bracket. Players A-H (red) are lined up before tournament organizer (green) O, who directs them to one of two rings with reeves (blue) R1 and R2. Bracket below shows the equivalent bracket being approximated by the queue.

Essentially, this creates a bracket that goes straight down the line, with byes assigned to players at the end of the line at the end of every round.

Double Elimination

A double-elimination tournament is like a single-elimination tournament except players have to be eliminated twice. The advantage of this is that everybody gets to fight at least twice. The disadvantage is that you now have to organize twice as many fights and think harder half way through. You should construct the actual bracket when running a double-elimination tournament, because there is much more to keep track of than a single-elimination tournament. It is possible, but not recommended, to skip writing it all down by making your players stand in two lines.

In this format, the “winners bracket” (the standard bracket everyone starts in) is accompanied by the “losers bracket”. Losing a bout in the winners bracket sends you to the losers bracket. Losing a bout in the losers bracket sends you out of the tournament. Losing a bout in the later rounds of the winners bracket essentially seeds you forward directly into the later rounds of the losers bracket.

Most of the way through the tournament, you will have your tentative 1st place “no losses” winner of the winners bracket. This person will stand by. Shortly thereafter, you will have your tentative 2nd place “1 loss” winner of the losers bracket (as well as your 3rd and 4th, who were the last people eliminated from the losers bracket). These two people will fight the final round for real first place. The tentative 1st, who has not lost a bout yet, enters this fight “with Advantage”; they must be defeated twice to be knocked down to real 2nd place. Crucially, this means the tentative 2nd may face a player they have already lost to. They are not knocked out despite the previous loss, but have the opportunity to challenge for 1st place by winning two bouts.

Example of double-elimination bracket with 8 starting players. Players who lose in the winners bracket (upper, names in red) are knocked down to the losers bracket (lower, names colored according to round).

Example of double-elimination bracket with 8 starting players. Players who lose in the winners bracket (upper, names in red) are knocked down to the losers bracket (lower, names colored according to round).

Rounds of the winners bracket must be played before the corresponding round of the losers bracket. Losers of round #R of the winners bracket are seeded into round #R of the losers bracket. It is best to alternate rounds – play round 1 of the winners bracket, then round 1 of losers bracket, then round 2 of the winners bracket, then round 2 of the losers bracket…and so forth. This method minimizes the amount of time players must sit around waiting for the losers bracket to start – players eliminated from early rounds of the losers bracket know that they may safely leave.

It is possible to run a double-elimination tournament without writing the brackets out. Similar to an unseeded single-elimination tournament, you must simply have losers of the winners line stand on the other side of the field, forming a losers line. This is not recommended, because it is much easier to make mistakes, requires keeping everyone standing in place, and players must stand around for a long time waiting for the second stage to begin.

Running the Tournament

Now that the theory of simple tournaments has been explained, I will describe the practical steps of running a tournament.

Early Prep (1 week to 1 hour before)

  1. Announce tournament rules and categories (e.g. Facebook post)
  2. Recruit reeves – 2 per ring is ideal (one on each side of the fight), 1 works in a pinch. If there are 8 or fewer entrants, 1 ring is sufficient. Usually, at least 2 rings is ideal. Rarely is it practically useful to have more than 4 rings; the field gets too widespread to manage.

Stage (last hour)

  1. Confirm location is suitable. Clear terrain, or move if necessary. Decide where you will stand, where rings will be, and where players can wait between bouts.
  2. Confirm reeves are ready and willing.
  3. Recruit entrants; put out a notepad and demand players sign up. It is around this time that you need to make a decision on tournament format, if you were holding multiple options depending on the number of players.
  4. Make a firm decision on start time and repeatedly announce it to the crowd. They will forget.

Start (10 minutes before)

  1. Close signups. Count entrants. Draw your bracket and assign seeds, if applicable.
  2. Call fighters to the field. Remind them what the format of the tournament is, and the order of categories, if applicable.
  3. Introduce your reeves; call their names and have them raise their hands. Introduce your rings; say the name and point to the spot. Either way, you need to name locations so when you go “First two fighters, go to Rachel!” or “Alice and Beth, you’re fighting in ring 1!”, they know where you are telling them to go.
  4. Tell them where to stand in line, if applicable.

Repetition

  1. Call the next 2 fighters to the open ring. Repeat if there are multiple open rings.
  2. When no open rings are left, call the next 2 fighters up as “on deck”.
  3. Look at your paper to make sure you’re not missing anything.
  4. When a bout ends, the reeve(s) of that ring should announce the results. “Alice defeats Beth” is the ideal way to do it; “Her” points, “I won” fighter keeps walking, “Alice.”, etc., can all be ambiguous. Explicitly stating the winner and the loser reminds you exactly which bout that was and whose names go where on your paper, or who you need to call upon to give instructions or ask clarifying questions. Record results (on paper or by sending people to the appropriate line).
  5. Repeat from step 1 until the lines are empty or your paper is full. As players run out in the last 2 rounds or so, winners of bouts will be thrown directly into another fight. It would be courteous to give them a short break in between bouts.

Wind down

  1. If that’s the only set, announce results.
  2. If there’s more sets – call a 5 to 10 minute break. Get water, do math, eat a pickle, etc. Announce time and category of next set.
  3. Look at your paper to make sure you’re not missing anything.
  4. Repeat Repetition section.
  5. At the end of the last category, do whatever multi-category victory-point math is necessary to determine overall placements. 4|2|1|0.5 points for 1st|2nd|3rd|4th place would be normal. Announce results. Remember to write it down so you can post it on the internet later.