by MIOM|Tafokints

Background

Tournament Bracket

At local tournaments, it’s important to not only cater to top players, but also to newer players by making the experience enjoyable for them in order to grow the community. With the growth over the past year, local tournaments have seen significant increases in attendance with some even reaching over 300 entrants. Although the growth is great, certain things have to be sacrificed at local tournaments such as the ability to run round-robin pools. New players rave about round-robin pools because it allows for them to play 4-7 tournament sets in one day.

With the sheer volume of players, it’s unrealistic to run round-robin pools while finishing at a reasonable hour. To finish the tournament in a timely manner, many tournament organizers (TOs) have decided to run double-elimination brackets or bracket pools instead (note: bracket pools are essentially bite-sized double-elimination brackets). Though double elimination brackets allow for a tournament to finish on time, the experience is less exciting for a new player, who will often go 0-2 in bracket and then spend the rest of the tournament not doing much.

Continue Brackets

Recently, Tim “Swift” Tilley mentioned about running “Continue” brackets at his local tournaments, receiving great feedback from the participants. A “Continue” bracket takes all the players who went 0-2 from the main bracket into another double elimination bracket, allowing for newer players to play more matches during the day.

As a tournament gets deep into bracket, many of the setups are no longer needed, freeing up many of the setups for other things, usually friendlies. The “Continue” bracket makes good use of these extra setups. It’ll definitely take great resource management for a tournament organizer to finish everything in time, but the feedback has seemed to be very positive. Moving forward, it seems like a reasonable compromise for local events that cannot quite run round-robin pools, while giving new players a solid amount of tournament sets and their money’s worth.

What do you guys think?

#SSBMTOs