On his website tournamentdesign.org, Joe Czapski has some ingenious tournament ideas.
One of his chief thoughts is to try to equalize the treatment of the upper and lower brackets in double- (and even triple- and quadruple-) elimination tournaments. He has a suite of Excel-based brackets for download. None of the ones I looked at looks like anything I’ve ever seen.
I’ve analyzed the “balanced” bracket for a 16-team double elimination so that I can relate it to the more conventional brackets already discussed. Continue reading “A Balanced Bracket”