# Running Tournaments
# Introduction & TO Responsibilities
If you’re reading this section, you’ve decided that you want to run something bigger, bigger than the dailies, bigger than the weeklies. Running a full fledged tournament is a whole other beast where you need to factor in a lot of consideration, planning, and, unfortunately, sacrificing your own performance. If you still have the dream of becoming #1, becoming a TO is not a part of that path.
As a TO, you put the tournament first before anything else. It is up to you to have everything run smoothly, on-time, and on-point. If there’s a problem, it will be up to you to resolve it. You may delegate the work down the line, but ultimately, everything funnels back to your decision making. If you accept what I’ve written above, you can continue forward. Otherwise, please spare people the trouble of playing in a messy tournament.
# Logistics
Logistics is the backbone of all tournaments. It’s understanding how long everything takes and how things affect each other. The basics of logistics is simply managing how long a bracket / pool will take. From there, you add constraints of overlap, concurrency, and downtime. Under the external links section, I’ve linked a number of guides written by best TO in the world, Juggleguy. Please study them up to understand how scheduling works.
# Round Robin Pools
Time formula: kt ( n(n-1) ) / 2s
- k = Tournament efficiency multiplier (higher multiplier represents more downtime)
- t = average time per set
- n = players per pool
- s = setups per pool
Generally speaking, 4-5 players per pool is good with one setup. 6-7 is better with 2. Example:
- k = 1.5, t = 12min, n = 4, s = 1 → 108 min
- k = 1.5, t = 12min, n = 6, s = 2 → 135 min
# Double Elimination Bracket
There is unfortunately no formula that covers the playtime of the entire bracket, especially since people change how sets are played mid-bracket. It is simply adding time per round. You would have to calculate the tournament out through raw addition. You can roughly estimate how much time a bracket takes through standard templates of 32, 16, and 8 man brackets.
# Bracket Pools
Leading in from the above, today’s standards of tournaments tend to push this format to help things run more smoothly.
Typical bracket pool sizes would run from 5 - 8 for regular sized tournaments (16 is really pushes it, but that would national+ size tournaments)
Top 32 or 16 bracket from the top 2 of each pool is what usually happens. Graduation (putting people in losers’ bracket back into winners’) is up to the TO’s discretion (although ill-advised because that creates triple elimination)
# Doubles
The worst event to run every tournament. You need to grab 4 people out of their other events to play their match, usually causing their other matches to get held up. Being able to schedule doubles well is the sign of how well a TO can schedule things on the fly. Preparing doubles ahead of time before the tournament starts will only get you up a couple waves, but after that, the top players will delay things all the same.
Do not plan doubles the same as a regular DE bracket. You will be hit HARD with the delays and the entire schedule will fall out of place. Plan for a significant amount of downtime and delays. An 8-man doubles bracket calculates out to be roughly 2 hours to play, but it’ll take more like 4. Doubles is very, very unpredictable.
# Number of pools
If you look back at many tournaments out there, you would notice a lot of the numbers are a power of 2. The number of pools is an obvious one, you would have 4, 8, 16, 32, or 64 pools and never any amount in the middle. If you have a number outside of this pattern, the promotion of players out of pools would be uneven, forcing a bias that shouldn’t exist (i.e. some 2nd seeds wouldn’t be considered the same as another 2nd seed and get shafted).
Always have a power of 2 number of pools.