Swiss Format
By AlphaZealot | Published: May 19, 2008 9:33pm EST
 Tournaments are rarely run in the Swiss format for video games. The most popular example of a Smash tournament that ran in Swiss format was Getting Schooled 2 in Maryland in 2005. The Swiss format is one of the most accurate ways of determining how players stack up against each other, but it is also the most time consuming, which is why most large tournaments simply do a few rounds of pool play followed by a double-elimination bracket. What occurs in a Swiss format is relatively simple: you continue to play people with a similar record. Everyone is randomly seeded in the first round. In the second round, players with one win play each other and players with one loss player each other. In the third round, players with two wins play each other, players with one win play each other, and players that have yet to win play each other. This setup could be continued all the way until only a single person remains. After a certain point, usually when there are eight or 16 players left, most tournaments will switch to seeded double elimination to speed up the process and provide more excitement for the final matches. The most common example of a Swiss format is a Chess tournament. The only difference between here and what is described above is that Chess players are seeded using the ELO ranking system. |
