Proposal a simple and quick solution to three-way finals

[sugar ovens]

I think three-way finals might be the most universally hated, most complained about tournament aspect. Like, i don't think i need to explain what's wrong with those. So hey, if they are so bad, why not just get rid of them? I'm sure this has already been proposed at some point, but i think it's a worthwile idea to discuss..

Here's a round from a random tour with a 3*2^n bracket. Imagine it's round 1.

SoulWind  vs  twash
chub  vs  Raiza
egalvanc  vs  Kaz
Excal  vs  ABR
Serpi  vs  Unowndragon
Melbelle  vs  zf

So the simple obvious solution is to just give out byes until we hit a nice non-three-way-finals number. No ground-breaking revolutionary thoughts here. I'll remove two players to make the example a bit uglier.

SoulWind  vs  twash
chub  vs  Raiza
egalvanc  vs  Bye
Excal  vs  Bye
Serpi  vs  Bye
Melbelle  vs  Bye
zf vs Bye
Unowndragon vs Bye

Problem solved. The aesthetically pleasing way to do this is:

SoulWind vs (twash vs  Raiza)
chub vs (Unowndragon vs  zf)
egalvanc vs Melbelle
Excal vs Serpi

with a longer deadline. I imagine for semi-/unofficial tournaments that have 1 week long r1 this would be a two week deadline for the whole round, and one week deadline for "preliminary round" matches. I think this would suffice for officials as well, but idk, one+one week? two+one week?

Regarding point rewards in cups - win in "preliminary round" is one point, win in round 1 two points, getting a bye and losing afterwards is zero points.

The only downside i see with this is the need to decide the r1 deadline in officials, because these are already two weeks long for a reason. Otherwise - it's just the same one r1 game advantage / disadvantage that players just randomly get all the time with byes, activity wins etc - it's completely inconsequential AND also it will be there no matter what. Also players in some matches will get more time to schedule, but that feels like a pretty minor issue.

 

[Irpachuza]

Like, i don't think i need to explain what's wrong with those.

Can you do so? Because sincerely this isn't a solution, it's just saying "only bracketmake with powers of 2 structures, force all the necessary byes there, and give an extra week to play all the games that didn't got byes". If this was preferred it would have been implemented already, so that's why I'm not sure what's wrong with three way finals except being slightly more annoying because they might need repeats.

 

[sugar ovens]

Sure, the problem with three-way finals is that they might need repeats, sometimes several ones, which can extend tournaments and are inconvenient for players. Also they are generally unpopular. Making a small change to the bracket might be less inconvenient. Here's how it could look like with a high number of byes.

If this was preferred it would have been implemented already, so that's why I'm not sure what's wrong with three way finals except being slightly more annoying because they might need repeats.

Yeah, i'm not pretending that this is something *new*. But you see, for many, many years it was too "preferred" to randomly not allow up to hundreds of players to play in a tournament because of a completely arbitrary maximum bye percentage. So, i don't have much faith here. PR threads are the place to propose/discuss something being changed/implemented, no?

 

[Merritt]

Speaking personally, not on behalf of the td team, ect

Round Robin finals are currently prevented for double elimination tournaments. The option to remove round robin finals when we changed the maximum bye percentage earlier this year was discussed but discarded, as we did not want to have a maximum bye percentage as high as 50% (exactly one game in a round 1 of 1025 people for example) and the previously suggested option of having incredibly long (100+ person) substitute lists was counterproductive to the intent of changing the bye percentage in the first place.

This isn't intended to close this thread immediately, but please be aware that this exact idea has been discussed and refused before.