How a Tournament Works
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Single Elimination Tournaments
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Single elimination tournaments are a very common type of tournament and one of the best known tournaments, March Madness, uses a single elimination format. Single elimination tournaments use a bracket and seed the teams from best to worst. The best team plays the worst team, the second best team plays the second worst team and so on. This ensures that the top 2 teams cannot play each other until the finals. The winner of the tournament is the last team standing.
Double Elimination Tournaments
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Double elimination tournaments are similar to single elimination tournaments except that a team must lose twice in order to be eliminated from the tournament. When a team loses its first game, it moves from the winners' bracket to the losers' bracket. The advantage to a team winning its games is that it will not have to play as many games as those in the losers' bracket because the losers' bracket is consistently having more teams added to it as teams lose games from the winners' bracket. Some double elimination tournaments have double elimination championships meaning the team that emerges from the losers bracket has to win twice in a row against the winner of the winners' bracket. Others use a single elimination championship game where the winner of the match-up between the winner of the winners' bracket and the winner of the losers' bracket is the champion.
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Swiss System Tournament
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A Swiss system tournament is different from other types of tournaments because no teams are eliminated. It differs from a round robin tournament because the tournament has a set number of rounds and starts with the higher ranked teams playing the lower ranked teams. Each round, teams with comparable records are matched up against each other. For example, after 3 rounds, teams that have won all their games will play other teams that have also won all 3 games and teams that have lost all 3 games will play teams that are also have no wins. At the end of the tournament, ties are broken by various tie breakers including how tough their opponents were and how close the games were. This system is particularly effective for tournaments in which ties are possible like chess.
Round Robin Tournaments
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Round robin tournaments are those in which every team plays every other team and the winner of the tournament is the team with the best record. These tournaments are usually done with smaller numbers of teams when it is feasible for each team to play each other. These tournaments have a variety of tie-breaking methods such as head to head or points for minus points against.
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