By Ponder
February, 25 2000 |
Running your own Street Fighter tournament can be a rewarding experience.
Sure, playing against your buddies in the arcade or over the Playstation
is fun, but there's nothing like the excitement and edge that organized,
competetive tournament play brings. Running your own local tournament
is a great way to meet some of the SF players in your area, and when
planned properly is a lot of fun.
Of course, you don't get all this for free. There's a lot to running a
tournament; You need to obtain prizes, do some promotion, etc. Most
importantly, you need a fair system for the actual "fight-management":
Who fights whom, for how long, and how you determine who wins.
I've participated in tournaments since Classic. More recently, I've
been a participant in weekly Sunnyvale Golfland tournaments, and have
helped organize and run Mega-tournaments B2 and B3. I hope someone out
there can benefit from my experience.
There are several systems you can use to match one player against
another. All of the most popular systems are variations of these
basic rules:
- Machine is set to best 2/3 rounds.
- Winner is determined by the best 2 out of 3 games (or 3/5 or 5/7).
The winner of a single game must keep his character. The loser
is allowed to pick a new character.
- The loser is given the option of switching sides (eg. from the left
to the right joystick) after the game.
The two most popular variations on this are what I call Standard and
Double-Blind character selection.
I like the Standard system because it's simple and doesn't require an
outside arbiter. Double-Blind is good when character selection plays
a crucial role in determining the winner of a match (eg. in ST).
Whichever system you choose, be sure to use it for EVERY match in
the tournament.
There are several different ways to run a tournament. Some of the
most popular are listed below.
Single Elimination
Perhaps the simplest tournament system. 1 loss and you're out.
People are put into a funnel-like bracket designed to narrow down the
pool to 1 winner. Is by far the fastest system; in a 32 man
tournament, you can determine the winner in only 31 matches.
Double Elimination
A variation on single elimination with a "Winners" and a "Losers"
bracket. One loss sends you to the losers bracket, a second loss
and you're out. Overall, is much more fair than a Single Elimination
tournament, and you'll (theoretically) always have #1 vs #2 as the
final match. However, a 32 man tournament will take either 62 or 63
matches to determine the winner (twice as long as single elimination)
Round Robin
Divide the pool of players into several groups. Within each group,
everyone plays everyone else at least once. The players with the
best records in each group are put into a final group, which fights
it out for the winner. Perhaps the most fair system, but takes a
LOT of matches. If you divide a 32 man pool into 4 groups of 8 and
take the top 2 from each group to form another group of 8, it will
take you 140 matches to determine the winner. IMHO, impractical
for most large tournaments.
For Street Fighter, the Double Elimination format is by far the most
often system used. It provides the best comprimise
between fairness and the time it takes to run the tournament.
The idea behind a double elimination tournament is that everyone has
to lose twice before they are eliminated. There are two main styles
of running this kind of tournament, the pool system and the bracket
system.
The pool system uses 2 categories (or pools) of people. The people
who haven't lost at all (called the WINNERS POOL) and the people who
have only lost once (the LOSERS POOL). Everyone starts out in the
WINNERS POOL. During each round of the tournament, you pair up people
from the same pool and fight it out. Losers in the WINNERS POOL move
over to the LOSERS POOL. Losers in the LOSERS POOL are eliminated.
At the end of the tournament, the single person left in the LOSERS POOL
fights against the single person left in the WINNERS POOL.
The bracket system is similar to the pool system, but much more structured.
In this system, all matchups are pretty much pre-determined after the
tournament is seeded. You keep track of where people are in the
tournament on a diamond shaped chart called a bracket. Everyone
starts in the middle and winners move to the right, while losers move
to the left.
When you're using a double-elimination format, you should always use
the bracket system. There are several very good reasons for this:
- It helps you to keep things organized. Tournaments can be hectic
and you should try to be as organized as possible.
- It lets the participants of the tournament know that you're organized.
This is important, as there is often at least a moderate sum of
money on the line at large tournaments. (In other words, it lets
people know that you're not fixing the bracket so your buddy takes
home the pot).
- It adds to the excitement of the tournament when people can see
how things are actually developing. It's nice to be able to see things
like "Everyone from Utah is in the losers bracket!" or "If I can
just get past this match with Choi, I'm on easy street."
I can't emphasise enough how important it is to have a bracket.
Several major tournaments that have been run using the pool system
have had some major problems (all IMHO) that could have been solved had
they used a bracket from the start.
Even at its simplest, running a double elimination bracket is no cake walk.
Before I talk about some of the more exotic things you can do, lets just
look at a simple 8 man bracket.
_______(B)
| _________
_____| _____ _________ _____
| |______| (A|_____
| |_____ _________ _____| |
____| _________ |
| | _______(A) (C|_______
| | | _________ | |
| |_____| _____ _________ _____ | |
_____|D) |______| (B|_____| |__________
| |_____ _________ _____| |
|_____(C) _________ (D)______|
Complicated, eh? Don't worry, it's not so bad. The first thing you do
is fill in your 8 players right in the middle (suppose our players are
named 'one', 'two', ... 'eight').
_______(B)
| __one____
_____| _____ __two____ _____
| |______| (A|_____
| |_____ __three__ _____| |
____| __four___ |
| | _______(A) (C|_______
| | | __five___ | |
| |_____| _____ __six____ _____ | |
_____|D) |______| (B|_____| |__________
| |_____ __seven__ _____| |
|_____(C) __eight__ (D)______|
You'll notice that puts 4 pairs of people right along the middle. These
are your first 4 matches. Run each match from top to bottom, writing the
loser of the match in the space to the left and the winner in the space to
the right (as shown below). In this example, we'll assume 'one' is better
than 'two' etc. We'll also assume no upsets (so 'one' is going to end up
winning the tournament)
_______(B)
| __one____
_____| two__ __two____ _one_
| |______| (A|_____
| |four_ __three__ three| |
____| __four___ |
| | _______(A) (C|_______
| | | __five___ | |
| |_____| six__ __six____ five_ | |
_____|D) |______| (B|_____| |__________
| |eight __seven__ seven| |
|_____(C) __eight__ (D)______|
At this point, you've got your 4 losers on the left and your
4 winners on the right. We haven't eliminated anyone yet; we've just
separated the pool into 2 groups. A general rule in double elimination
brackets is that you should run the losers out until you can't do any more
matches. So next, we'll run the 2 matches in the losers bracket. Again,
we'll go from the top to the bottom (our last match was 'seven' vs 'eight'.
If we went from bottom to top, then 'eight' would have to play 2 matches
in a row).
_______(B)
| __one____
_____| two__ __two____ _one_
| |_two__| (A|_____
| |four_ __three__ three| |
____| __four___ |
| | _______(A) (C|_______
| | | __five___ | |
| |_____| six__ __six____ five_ | |
_____|D) |_six__| (B|_____| |__________
| |eight __seven__ seven| |
|_____(C) __eight__ (D)______|
Notice that 'four' and 'eight' have been eliminated ('four' lost to 'three'
and 'two', 'eight' lost to 'seven' and 'six'). Since they're out, you don't
need to write their names anywhere. 'Two' and 'six' won, so you write their
names in the blank to the left.
What should you do now? Well, 'two' is suppose to fight the person in the
blank labeled (B). This person is going to come from the _loser_ of the
'five' vs. 'seven' match. Since that position hasn't been determined yet,
there's nothing more we can do on the loser's side. At this point, go ahead
and run (from top to bottom) the 2 matches on the winners side of the bracket:
_seven_(B)
| __one____
_____| two__ __two____ _one_
| |_two__| (A|_one_
| |four_ __three__ three| |
____| __four___ |
| | _three_(A) (C|_______
| | | __five___ | |
| |_____| six__ __six____ five_ | |
_____|D) |_six__| (B|_five| |__________
| |eight __seven__ seven| |
|_____(C) __eight__ (D)______|
'One' and 'five' won, so you write their names in the blank to the right.
Since 'three' and 'seven' are in the _winners_ bracket, they aren't yet
eliminated. Instead, they go over to the losers bracket. You see that
little (B| next between the five vs. seven match? That means you should put
the loser of the match in the blank labelled (B) in the losers side. The same
goes for the (A| in the one vs three match.
Now that we've filled in the (A) and (B) holes in the loser's side, we can run
the two matches over there (and should do so). Don't run the 'one' vs. 'five'
match yet! If you do, the winner will have to wait FOREVER for his turn! So
long that he's likely to fall asleep or go home. =) So run the 'seven' vs.
'two' and 'three' vs. 'six' matches.
_seven_(B)
| __one____
_two_| two__ __two____ _one_
| |_two__| (A|_one_
| |four_ __three__ three| |
____| __four___ |
| | _three_(A) (C|_______
| | | __five___ | |
| |three| six__ __six____ five_ | |
_____|D) |_six__| (B|_five| |__________
| |eight __seven__ seven| |
|_____(C) __eight__ (D)______|
'Seven' and 'six' are eliminated, and 'two' and 'three' continue. Since we can
still run more matches on the loser's side, go ahead and run 'two' vs. 'three'.
_seven_(B)
| __one____
_two_| two__ __two____ _one_
| |_two__| (A|_one_
| |four_ __three__ three| |
two_| __four___ |
| | _three_(A) (C|_______
| | | __five___ | |
| |three| six__ __six____ five_ | |
_____|D) |_six__| (B|_five| |__________
| |eight __seven__ seven| |
|_____(C) __eight__ (D)______|
At this point, you only have 1 person left in the loser's bracket, so you need
to jump back to the winner's side and run off 'one' vs. 'five'.
_seven_(B)
| __one____
_two_| two__ __two____ _one_
| |_two__| (A|_one_
| |four_ __three__ three| |
two_| __four___ |
| | _three_(A) (C|_one___
| | | __five___ | |
| |three| six__ __six____ five_ | |
_____|D) |_six__| (B|_five| |__________
| |eight __seven__ seven| |
|five_(C) __eight__ (D)______|
As before, we move the loser of a match in the winner's bracket to his
corresponding blank on the losers's side. This sets up the match between 'two'
and 'five', which 'two' will win. That makes 'two' the WINNER of the losers
bracket. As such, he gets the right to return to the winners bracket to fight
'one' in the FINALS (as shown below)
_seven_(B)
| __one____
_two_| two__ __two____ _one_
| |_two__| (A|_one_
| |four_ __three__ three| |
two_| __four___ |
| | _three_(A) (C|_one___
| | | __five___ | |
| |three| six__ __six____ five_ | |
_two_|D) |_six__| (B|_five| |__________
| |eight __seven__ seven| |
|five_(C) __eight__ (D)_two__|
Here's the last tricky part... 'Two' has lost one match. Therefore, if 'one'
beats 'two', 'One' is the grand champion and the tournament is over. HOWEVER, if
'two' beats 'one', then that will be 'one's' first loss. This is a double
elimination tournament and 'one' is NOT eliminated. 'Two' must beat 'one'
AGAIN in order to claim the title. Let me rephrase that: In the final matchup,
the winner of the losers bracket must beat his opponent twice in a row in order
to claim the title. The winner of the winners bracket need only win once.
'One' will beat 'two' (of course), and the final bracket will look like this:
_seven_(B)
| __one____
_two_| two__ __two____ _one_
| |_two__| (A|_one_
| |four_ __three__ three| |
two_| __four___ |
| | _three_(A) (C|_one___
| | | __five___ | |
| |three| six__ __six____ five_ | |
_two_|D) |_six__| (B|_five| |_one______
| |eight __seven__ seven| |
|five_(C) __eight__ (D)_two__|
Places are usually labelled on a double-elimination bracket so you don't have to
think about it. The way it works is that the longer you were in the tournament,
the higher you place. Our final ranking looks like this:
1st Place: One 5th Place: Six (tie)
2nd Place: Two 5th Place: Seven (tie)
3rd Place: Five 7th Place: Four (tie)
4th Place: Three 7th Place: Eight (tie)
That's a valid point. 90% of the time, you're not going to have a power of 2
number of people in your tournament. Suppose you only have 23? Then what do
you do? Well, the answer is to create a 32 man bracket and fill in only 23 of
the spaces. If someone has to fight an empty space, they automatically win
(lucky guy!). We call this giving the player a "Bye".
Filling the bracket is no trivial task, either. Which 23 slots should you use?
Most people are inclined to just go ahead and use the first 23 and leave the
bottom 9 empty. This results in the people in the bottom of the bracket
getting an unfair number of byes. What you should do instead is to fill in the
bracket as evenly as possible. First fill in 16 people, leaving a space between
each person. Of the remaining 7 people, put 4 in the top and 3 in the bottom
(again, evenly spaced). This will guarentee that the number of byes you give
is shared evenly among all the participants.
Some people think giving a bye isn't really fair. You shouldn't be able to
advance in the tournament without having to fight another player. It's not
fair to the people who don't get byes. These are all valid complaints.
However, if you fill your bracket properly, then at WORST you'll have a some
people getting 1 more bye than everyone else (in the winner's bracket). If
you have a situation where 1 person gets 0 byes and another gets 5 or 6, then
you didn't fill your bracket properly. Byes almost always occur in the
beginning of a tournament, where they have no affect on the final rankings.
Furthermore the alternative to not giving a bye is to have the player fight
someone else. If you have him fight someone who is still in the tournament,
you've essentially given that person a -1 bye (by making him fight an extra
match).
This means that the player replacing the bye has to be someone outside of
the tournament (we'll call him the Eliminator). If the Eliminator wins,
then the player is counted with a loss (and possible is kicked out of the
tournament if he was in the losers bracket). If the Eliminator loses, than
the player advances. This actually works fine in a pool system (but you
never want to use a pool system anyway; it has too many disadvantages).
It doesn't work at all in a bracket system tho. Consider what happens when
you have 17 players in a bracket. 17 is 1 greater than a power of 2, so what
you end up having is 1 match and 15 players getting a bye. In the Eliminator
system, this means you need 15 Eliminators! This really draws out the length
of the tournament, considering that it's possible for you to fight 16 matches
and only generate 1 "real" loss. Furthermore, suppose after this round of
Eliminators that you're left with 9 people. That's 1 more than a power of 2
and you'll need 8 Eliminators this round. On average, in a bracket system
using Eliminators, about 1/2 of your matches will be meaningless.
If you've read this far, you should already know enough to run your own
double-elimination tournament. However, there's a lot more we can do to
ensure that our tournament is as fair as possible. To do so, we're going to
have to take apart the bracket a bit and see how it works. Lets look at the
initial bracket again, shall we?
_______(B)
| __one____
_____| _____ __two____ _____
| |______| (A|_____
| |_____ __three__ _____| |
____| __four___ |
| | _______(A) (C|_______
| | | __five___ | |
| |_____| _____ __six____ _____ | |
_____|D) |______| (B|_____| |__________
| |_____ __seven__ _____| |
|_____(C) __eight__ (D)______|
I call your attention to the way people are moved from the winners' to the
losers' bracket. Specifically, when 'three' lost to 'one', we moved him from
the top of the bracket all the way to the bottom on the other side. Why is
that? Wouldn't it be easier to move him straight across to the top? Yes, but
consider the following situation:
one vs two -> one wins.
three vs four -> three wins.
two vs four -> two wins.
one vs three -> three pulls off the upset and WINS!
If we move people straight across, that will generate a bracket
that looks like this:
_one___(A) <------------- Move 'one' to here. BAD!
| __one____
_____| _two_ __two____ _one_
| |_two__| (A|three
| |_four __three__ three| |
____| __four___ |
| | _______(B) (C|_______
| | | _________ | |
| |_____| _____ _________ _____ | |
_____|D) |______| (B|_____| |__________
| |_____ _________ _____| |
|_____(C) _________ (D)______|
Look at poor 'two'! Not only did he lose his first match to 'one', he has
to play him again in his third match! This is what is known as DOUBLE
JEOPARDY. In a fair tournament, you shouldn't have to play a person you've
lost to EVER again until it's impossible to avoid it. Not only is this unfair
to 'two', it skews the rankings! Although 'one' and 'two' are the 2 best
players, they can't possibly take the top two spots now (one of them is going
to get eliminated). If you're making your own brackets, be SURE to avoid
double jeopardy. Had we moved 'one' to the bottom of the losers' bracket
instead of the top, this never would have happened ('one' would have played
'two' in the semi-finals of the losers bracket and one of them would have taken
4th place, the other going on to take top 3).
As long as we're on the topic of fairness, lets look again at
the final rankings of our tournament:
1st Place: One 5th Place: Six (tie)
2nd Place: Two 5th Place: Seven (tie)
3rd Place: Five 7th Place: Four (tie)
4th Place: Three 7th Place: Eight (tie)
First of all, 'Five' sucks (he's bottom 50%), yet he managed to take 3rd place.
And look at poor 'four'! He's one of the best players (only 3 others are better
than him), but he got LAST. It was just his bad luck that resulted in him
fighting 2 of the 3 best people in the tournament for his first 2 matches!
(The technical term for this is BPS, or Bob Painter Syndrome). There's a reason
this happened: A double-elimination bracket is only guaranteed to select the
top _2_ players from the entire pool. If you have a pool of 32 people, that
isn't very fair.
Why are our rankings so skewed? Look back at our initial bracket. For some
bizarre reason, we decided to put the all the good players at the top of the
bracket and all the bad ones at the bottom. This results in all the good
players eliminating each other, letting the bad ones take places that they
_really_ didn't earn. If we had spread out the good players, we would have
gotten different results. Consider this bracket:
_three_(B)
| __one____
three| eight __eight__ _one_
| |_five_| (A|_one_
| |five_ __four___ _four| |
three_| __five___ |
| | _four__(A) (C|_one___
| | | __two____ | |
| |four_| seven __seven__ _two_ | |
_two_|D) |_six__| (B|_two_| |_one______
| |_six_ __three__ three| |
|_two_(C) __six____ (D)_two__|
Now look at our final rankings:
1st Place: One 5th Place: Five (tie)
2nd Place: Two 5th Place: Six (tie)
3rd Place: Three 7th Place: Seven (tie)
4th Place: Four 7th Place: Eight (tie)
Because we spread out the good players when we first filled in the bracket, we
got much more fair results. This is an important point, so I'm going to write
it in caps. IF WE CAN IDENTIFY THE GOOD PLAYERS, THEN WE CAN MAKE THE BRACKET
MORE FAIR BY SPREADING THEM OUT IN THE INITIAL PLACEMENT. Sorry about that,
but it's really really very important.
The ideal situation, of course, is one where you can arbitrarily seed all the
players in the bracket and fill it accordingly. This, however, is most likely
not going to be the case. I would even argue, that you don't want to do this,
because it can promote bad blood unnecessarily. All you need to do is to
identify the top players. If you can rank the top 4 players in the tournament,
you're already doing very well. This lets you spread them out in a way that
ensures that if they indeed _are_ the 4 best players and they win all the
matches they're supposed to win, then they will rank 1-4. The more you can
seed, the better. For a 32 man bracket, I think the ideal situation is:
- Rank the top 4 players. These are top tier players
- Identify 4-8 additional players who are in the 2nd tier.
They are clearly better than the rest of the pack, but you really
don't need to rank them. Just let them be a pack.
- The remaining 20-24 player make up the rest of the field.
With this information, you can run a very fair tournament. As an aside, I'd
also argue that these kinds of tournaments are also much more exciting. When
you get right down to it, the last few matches of your tournament are _ALL_
going to be block busters. The last 5 matches of our most recent bracket are
one vs four, three vs four, one vs two, three vs two, and one vs two. That
kind of lineup makes for great drama.
Ok, lets review. We've talked about different kinds of rules to use when
running individual games. We've talked about different tournament systems,
and explained in detail how to run a double elimination tournament.
In a double-elimination tournament, we've shown that random seeding usually
leads to semi-random results after the top 2. We've also illustrated the
importance of avoiding double-jeopardy in tournaments. Finally, we showed that
if you seed your tournament just a little bit, you're results will be much
more indicative of who the best players are.
The Street Fighter tournament scene is growing a lot. I blame it on the Internet.
The big tournaments are getting bigger and more frequent, and little tournaments
are popping up everywhere. In this age, more and more people are starting to
travel (sometimes at great expense) to the big tournaments. If you're running
a big tournament that's attracting a lot of non-local competition, you might want
to consider seeding by region.
The logic behind seeing by region is simple: You have a small group of people
who put a lot on the line to travel to the tournament (plane tickets, 28
hours drive, whatever). In order to be as fair as possible, you really don't
want any of these people to have to fight against each other in the
tournament. I mean, no one travelled hundereds of miles to fight in a
tournament where they're eliminated by their buddies in the first 2 matches,
right? As such, we should rig the bracket so that such a thing is unlikely.
A similar thing is done in the NCAA basketball tournament. In 1997, Stanford,
Cal, Arizona, and UCLA (all PAC 10 teams) made it to the tournament, but none
of those teams had to play against each other at any point in the tournament.
We've already seen a method of spacing people out in the bracket according to
their seed. If we take a person's region into account when giving them a seed,
then we can use the same system to space people out by region (thus the term,
Seeding by Region).
Basically, you want to find your top 4 seeds from each region. If you can't
come up with 4, that's fine. Do the best you can. Next, you assign seeds to
the bracket as follows (suppose you have 2 regions):
Region A Region B
1st seed 1st seed <--- Bracket Seeds 1 and 2
2nd seed 2nd seed <--- Bracket Seeds 3 and 4
3rd seed 3rd seed <--- Bracket Seeds 5 and 6
4rd seed 4rd seed <--- Bracket Seeds 7 and 8
A fully played out bracket will probably look something like this (I've added
seeding to the initial ranks for clarity):
__A2___(B)
| 1)_A1____
_A2__| __B4_ 8)_B4____ __A1_
| |__A3__| (A|__A1_
| |__A3_ 4)_B2____ __B2_| |
_A2_| 5)_A3____ |
| | __B2___(A) (C|__A1___
| | | 2)_B1____ | |
| |_B2__| __A4_ 7)_A4____ __B1_ | |
__B1_|D) |__B3__| (B|__B1_| |__A1______
| |__B3_ 3)_A2____ __A2_| |
|__B1_(C) 6)_B3____ (D)__B1__|
Notice how this does 3 things:
- Almost everywhere in the bracket, we have A vs B. We've prevented
almost every intra-region matchup.
- We've maintained seeding such that the #1 seeds are on opposite
sides of the bracket. The top 4 final places are A1, B1, A2, and B2
- Most importantly, we've avoided all cases of double jeopardy.
Even if you're not seeding everyone, it's important that you
fill in the seeds of the bracket from left to right across your
regions. For example, had we only seeded the top 2 players in each regions, our bracket should STILL look like this:
Region A Region B
1st seed 1st seed <--- Seeds 1 and 2
2nd seed 2nd seed <--- Seeds 3 and 4
unseeded unseeded <--- Seeds 5 and 6
unseeded unseeded <--- Seeds 7 and 8
_______(B)
| ___A1____
_____| _____ ___B?____ _____
| |______| (A|_____
| |_____ ___B2____ _____| |
____| ___A?____ |
| | _______(A) (C|_______
| | | ___B1____ | |
| |_____| _____ ___A?____ _____ | |
_____|D) |______| (B|_____| |__________
| |_____ ___A2____ _____| |
|_____(C) ___B?____ (D)______|
That is, we need to ensure that we get a separation across regions, even if
we're not seeding the entire region.
Just as you're probably not going to get a power of 2 number of contestants,
you're most likely not going to get balanced regions. The "home region" almost
always makes up 1/2 of the field. What do you do then?
Well, the point of any kind of seeding is to avoid bad matchups. The way you
avoid bad matches is by spacing people out in the bracket. To do this
effectively, you must STUDY how people move through the bracket and seed
accordingly.
For example, suppose you have 13 people from region A, 5 from region B and
2 from region C. You can seed by region by filling your bracket in in this
order: AB AA AB AC AB AA AB AA AB AC A
Notice how all the B's are spaced out so that no single B will have to fight
another B until the 3rd round (at best). We've also spaced out the C's.
Now, once you've determine how you want to place people regionally, you can
go ahead and seed by rank. Make sure the #1 and #2 A people are on different
ends of the bracket, for example.
Filling out a bracket is a very soft science. Just do your best. =)
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