Forum:Pools format
Several months ago, I attended a Melee/PM tournament that attracted about a hundred entrants. Before the tourney began, I asked the TO if there was going to be pools and what format it was (double-elimination). This soured me a bit because, as an amateur, I hate having to spend a large chunk of money to enter a tourney and then go two and out. I entered the tournament anyway and was disappointed from drowning in pools, only having two tournament sets. (I was extremely close to winning a set at said tourney, but that's besides the point).
For those who don't know, when a tournament gathers more than 60-70 entrants or so, pools are usually conducted for seeding in the bracket. Back in the day, all tournaments that ran pools were in the form of round-robin, and the top X (usually 2-4) out of Y (usually 5-10) make the bracket (or another round of round-robin pools). A large percentage of big tourneys still use round-robin pools, but unfortunately, from my observations, it seems that bracket is the more dominant form of pools in big tourneys like Apex. This is very unfortunate because large tournaments will have MANY players starting out in the competitive scene and want to get better (such as myself). As I mentioned, round-robin pools are IMO a better way of seeding players for several reasons:
- They are perfectly fair, so the players who are truly the best in their pool advance, rather than just lucky players facing weaker players to get the placing they end up getting.
- Players who drowned 0-2 or 1-2 in bracket pools do not have as accurate of a visual of their skill due to only playing two/three players that entire tourney, while round-robin gives players about 3-4 times as many sets, giving a much more accurate vision of how good they are.
- The placings of tournaments using bracket pools have no more difference between them than the placings of tournaments using straight-bracket, while the round-robin format (usually) yields a seperate, distinct placing for EVERY player in each pool.
- Seeding isn't as severe of an issue due to the fairness of round-robin.
I want to know if anyone else who attended a tournament with said pools format before have had problems with double-elimination pools, as well as which format they prefer and why. Criticism is encouraged. Chilex (talk) 13:42, 17 August 2014 (EDT)
