A tournament is a competition involving at least three competitors, all participating in a sport or game. More specifically, the term may be used in either of two overlapping senses:
These two senses are distinct. All golf tournaments meet the first definition, but while match play tournaments meet the second, stroke play tournaments do not, since there are no distinct matches within the tournament. In contrast, association football leagues like the Premier League are tournaments in the second sense, but not the first, having matches spread across many venues over a period of up to a season. Many tournaments meet both definitions; for example, the Wimbledon tennis championship. Tournaments "are temporally demarcated events, participation in which confers levels of status and prestige amongst all participating members". [1]
A tournament-match (or tie or fixture or heat) may involve one or more game-matches (or rubbers or legs) and if necessary one or more tiebreak-matches between the competitors. For example, in the Davis Cup tennis tournament, a tie between two nations involves five rubbers between the nations' players. The team that wins the most rubbers wins the tie. In the later rounds of UEFA Champions League, each fixture is played over two legs. The scores of each leg are added, and the team with the higher aggregate score wins the fixture, with extra time, and if necessary, a penalty shoot-out used if the scores are level after both matches conclude. In this case, the first tiebreak-match is extra time (modified game-match with reduced duration) and the second tiebreak-match is a penalty shoot-out.
A knockout tournament or elimination tournament is divided into successive rounds; each competitor plays in at least one fixture per round. The top-ranked competitors in each fixture progress to the next round. As rounds progress, the number of competitors and fixtures decreases. The final round, usually known as the final or cup final, consists of just one fixture; the winner of which is the overall champion.
In a single-elimination tournament, only the top-ranked competitors in a fixture progress; in 2-competitor games, only the winner progresses. All other competitors are eliminated. This ensures a winner is decided with the minimum number of fixtures. However, most competitors will be eliminated after relatively few matches; a single bad or unlucky performance can nullify many preceding excellent ones.
A double-elimination tournament may be used in 2-competitor games to allow each competitor a single loss without being eliminated from the tournament. All losers from the main bracket enter a losers' bracket, the winner of which plays off against the main bracket's winner.
A triple-elimination tournament allows a competitor to lose two games and creates a third bracket or fourth bracket which are usually followed by a playoff. It is commonly used in curling tournaments.
Some elimination tournaments are in a best-of-n series, requiring a competitor to lose a majority of n games (in a series against the same opponent) before being eliminated (e.g. in a best-of-7 games series, the winner must win 4 games).
Some formats use a repechage, allowing losers to play extra rounds before re-entering the main competition in a later round. Rowing regattas often have repechage rounds for the "fastest loser" from the heats. The winners of these progress, but are at a disadvantage in later rounds owing to the extra effort expended during the repechage.
A family of tournament systems that grew from a system devised for the Victorian Football League, the historic predecessor to the Australian Football League (AFL), allow the teams with the best record before the playoffs to lose a game without being eliminated, whereas lesser qualifiers are not. Several of the most prominent leagues in Australia use such a system, such as the AFL and the National Rugby League in rugby league. The A-League of association football also used such a system through its 2011–12 season, but now uses a pure knockout playoff. Similar systems are used in cricket's Indian Premier League and most curling tournaments, and were also used by the Super League of European rugby league before being scrapped after the 2014 season.
In athletics meetings, fastest losers may progress in a running event held over several rounds; e.g. the qualifiers for a later round might be the first 4 from each of 6 heats, plus the 8 fastest losers from among the remaining runners.
An extreme form of the knockout tournament is the stepladder format where the strongest team (or individual, depending on the sport) is assured of a berth at the final round while the next strongest teams are given byes according to their strength/seeds; for example, in a four team tournament, the fourth and third seed figure in the first round, then the winner goes to the semifinals against the second seed, while the survivor faces the first seed at the final. Four American sports organizations either currently use this format, or have in the past:
A group tournament, league, division or conference involves all competitors playing a number of fixtures (again, a fixture is one name for a tournament-match that determines who, out of two or three or more, will advance; a fixture may consist of one or more game-matches between competitors). Points are awarded for each fixture, with competitors ranked based either on total number of points or average points per fixture. Usually each competitor plays an equal number of fixtures, in which case rankings by total points and by average points are equivalent. The English County Championship in cricket did not require an equal number of matches prior to 1963. [2]
In a round-robin tournament, each competitor plays all the others an equal number of times, once in a single round-robin tournament and twice in a double round-robin tournament. This is often seen as producing the most reliable rankings. However, for large numbers of competitors it may require an unfeasibly large number of rounds. A Swiss system tournament attempts to determine a winner reliably, based on a smaller number of fixtures. Unlike regular Groups format, fixtures are scheduled one round at a time and depending on the results of the previous one; a competitor will play another who has a similar record in previous rounds of the tournament. This allows the top (and bottom) competitors to be determined with fewer rounds than a round-robin, though the middle rankings are unreliable.
For clarification, this means in hypothesis UEFA adopts a Swiss System for UEFA Champions League, the second matchday in the first stage (today's Groups Stage) would depend on the results of the first matchday of the same stage, the third matchday would depend on the results of both the first and the second matchday, and so on, in contrast to the predetermination of all Groups Stage fixtures upon the initial draw. [3]
Another tournament system that attempts to reduce the number of fixtures per competitor is the Pot System. Under that system, competitors are divided to different "pots" based on predetermined ranking and are drawn to play one rival from each pot, including their own pot. For example, in a 36-team World Cup, teams would be divided into 3 pots, with each team playing 3 matches - one against a Pot A team, one against Pot B team, and one against a team from Pot C. All teams are then placed in one general standing the defines qualification to the following stage. [4]
There may be other considerations besides reliability of rankings. In some professional team sports, weaker teams are given an easier slate of fixtures as a form of handicapping. Sometimes schedules are weighted in favour of local derbies or other traditional rivalries. For example, NFL teams play two games against each of the other three teams in their division, one game against six of the other twelve teams in their conference, and one game against five of the sixteen teams in the other conference.
American sports are also unusual in providing fixtures between competitors who are, for ranking purposes, in different groups. Another, systematic, example of this was the 2006 Women's Rugby World Cup: each of the teams in Group A played each of the teams in Group B, with the groups ranked separately based on the results. (Groups C and D intertwined similarly.) An elaboration of this system is the Mitchell movement in duplicate bridge, discussed below, where north–south pairs play east–west pairs.
In 2-competitor games where ties are rare or impossible, competitors are typically ranked by number of wins, with ties counting half; each competitors' listings are usually ordered Wins–Losses(–Ties). Where ties are more common, this may be 2 points for a win and 1 for a tie, which is mathematically equivalent but avoids having too many half-points in the listings, or 3 points for a win and 1 for a tie, which de-emphasizes ties in favor of playing to a decisive result. These are usually ordered Wins–Ties–Losses. If there are more than two competitors per fixture, points may be ordinal (for example, 3 for first, 2 for second, 1 for third).
The primary objective of a tournament is to determine the winner of a competition. Ideally, the tournament should be designed in such a way that all participants have an equal chance to compete and progress, regardless of factors like seeding or scheduling. The influence of luck or chance on the results should be minimised. The tournament should also be an exciting and engaging event for participants and spectators. Hence the following requirements for an ideal tournament:
Many tournaments are held in multiple stages, with the top teams in one stage progressing to the next. American professional team sports have a "regular season" (group tournament) acting as qualification for the "post season" or "playoffs" (single-elimination tournament). A group stage (also known as pool play or the pool stage) is a round-robin stage in a multi-stage tournament. The competitors are divided into multiple groups, which play separate round-robins in parallel. Measured by a points-based ranking system, the top competitors in each group qualify for the next stage. In most editions of the FIFA World Cup finals tournament, the first round has been a group stage with groups of four teams, the top two qualifying for the "knockout stage" played as a single-elimination tournament. This format is common in many international team events, such as World Cups or Olympic tournaments. Some tournaments have two group stages, for example the 1982 FIFA World Cup or the 1999–2000 UEFA Champions League. As well as a fixed number of qualifiers from each group, some may be determined by comparing between different groups: at the 1986 FIFA World Cup and UEFA Euro 2016, the best four of six third-place sides qualified; at the 1999 Rugby World Cup the best one of five third-place sides did so.
Sometimes, results from an earlier phase are carried over into a later phase. In the Cricket World Cup, the second stage, known as the Super Eight since 2007 and before that the Super Six, features two teams from each of four preliminary groups (previously three teams from two preliminary groups), who do not replay the teams they have already played, but instead reuse the original results in the new league table. Formerly in the Swiss Football League, teams played a double round-robin, at which point they were split into a top "championship" group and a bottom "relegation" group; each played a separate double round-robin, with results of all 32 matches counting for ranking each group. A similar system is also used by the Scottish Premiership and its historic predecessor, the Scottish Premier League, since 2000. After 33 games, when every club has played every other club three times, the division is split into two halves. Clubs play a further five matches, against the teams in their half of the division. This can (and often does) result in the team placed seventh having a higher points total than the team placed sixth (because their final five games are considerably easier), nevertheless, a team in the bottom half never receives a higher final ranking than a team which qualified for the top half.
A multi-stage pool system was implemented by Curling Canada for the Canadian championship curling tournaments (the Scotties Tournament of Hearts for women and the Montana's Brier for men) starting in 2018. The change was intended to allow the expansion of the main stage of the tournament from twelve to sixteen teams while keeping the round robin at eleven games. The teams are seeded using a ranking system in which points are calculated based on the teams' results in all competitive bonspiels using a complicated formula. Seeds 1, 4, 5, 8, 9, 12, 13 and 16 and placed in Pool A while seeds 2, 3, 6, 7, 10, 11, 14 and 15 are placed in Pool B. After each team has played seven games, the top four teams from each pool advance to the "Championship Pool." Carrying over their entire round robin records with them, Championship Pool teams play one game against each of the four teams in the opposite pool, with the top four teams qualifying for the page playoffs. In contrast, teams that fail to qualify for the Championship Pool play only one additional "Placement Round" game against the team that finished in the same position in the opposite pool for the purposes of determining final tournament ranking. For these teams, there is little else to play for since there is no form of relegation (and, with the expansion of the field to sixteen teams, no "pre-qualifying tournament") and seeding is based solely on the performances of the participating teams and not the past results of the provinces and territories they represent.
The top Slovenian basketball league has a unique system. In its first phase, 12 of the league's 13 clubs compete in a full home-and-away season, with the country's representative in the Euroleague (an elite pan-European club competition) exempt. The league then splits. The top seven teams are joined by the Euroleague representative for a second home-and-away season, with no results carrying over from the first phase. These eight teams compete for four spots in a final playoff. The bottom five teams play their own home-and-away league, but their previous results do carry over. These teams are competing to avoid relegation, with the bottom team automatically relegated and the second-from-bottom team forced to play a mini-league with the second- and third-place teams from the second level for a place in the top league.
Where the number of competitors is larger than a tournament format permits, there may be multiple tournaments held in parallel, with competitors assigned to a particular tournament based on their ranking. In Chess, Scrabble, and many other individual games, many tournaments over one or more years contribute to a player's ranking. However, many team sports involve teams in only one major tournament per year. In European sport, including football, this constitutes the sole ranking for the following season; the top teams from each division of the league are promoted to a higher division, while the bottom teams from a higher division are relegated to a lower one.
This promotion and relegation occurs mainly in league tournaments, but also features in Davis Cup and Fed Cup tennis:
The hierarchy of divisions may be linear, or tree-like, as with the English football league pyramid.
In contract bridge a "tournament" is a tournament in the first sense above, composed of multiple "events", which are tournaments in the second sense. Some events may be single-elimination, double-elimination, or Swiss style. However, "Pair events" are the most widespread. In these events, a number of deals (or boards ) are each played several times by different players. For each such board the score achieved by each north–south (NS) pair is then measured against all the other NS pairs playing the same board. Thus pairs are rewarded for playing the same cards better than others have played them. There is a predetermined schedule of fixtures depending on the number of pairs and boards to be played, to ensure a good mix of opponents, and that no pair plays the same board or the same opponents twice (see duplicate bridge movements).
In poker tournaments, as players are eliminated, the number of tables is gradually reduced, with the remaining players redistributed among the remaining tables. Play continues until one player has won all of the chips in play. Finishing order is determined by the order in which players are eliminated: last player remaining gets first place, last player eliminated gets second, previous player eliminated gets third, etc.
In a "shootout" tournament, players do not change tables until every table has been reduced to one player.
While tournament structures attempt to provide an objective format for determining the best competitor in a game or sport, other methods exist.
Tournaments of value have come to legitimise what are often seen as marginalised practices that sit outside of popular culture. [6] For example, the Grammy Award ceremony helped to shape country music as a viable commercial field, [7] and Booker Prize ceremony helped to create new fields of literary fiction. [8] Tournaments of value go beyond game show and simple contests as the tournament itself emerges as being more significant, [9] bestowing status and prestige on the winner and, in the process, shapes industry practices and acts as institutional mechanisms for shaping social fields. [10]
A satellite tournament is either a minor tournament or event on a competitive sporting tour or one of a group of such tournaments that form a series played in the same country or region.[ citation needed ]
A satellite tournament in poker is a qualifying event. Winners of these satellites usually win the buy-in fee to a larger, more prestigious tournament like the World Series of Poker Main Event. Although there are some land-based satellite tournaments (usually for very high-stakes tournaments), most of them are online-based. Some sites, like PokerStars, maintain several tiers of satellites. A player can thus start out at one tier (not necessarily the lowest one) and play their way to a higher tier. The entry fee for each tier is always higher than the fee for the tier below it, with the first tier being the cheapest.
In professional tennis, satellite circuits were four-week tournaments (five before 1987), typically organised by a country's national tennis association and overseen by the International Tennis Federation. They were played by players who were ranked outside the top few hundred by the Association of Tennis Professionals, with openings for unranked players in the qualifying draw. Total prize money ranged from $25,000 to $75,000 per circuit. ATP points were awarded on the basis of a player's ranking within the circuit and from 1987 onwards on the basis of the conversion of a player's circuit points into ATP points. Players successful at this level of pro tennis would move on to play ATP Challenger Series or even top-flight ATP Tour events. The men's satellite tournaments began as early as 1971 such as the Pacific Southwest Satellite played in Inglewood, California was a standalone event won by Mike Estep, and were officially the second tier of tournaments after the main tour and predated the introduction of challenger events in 1978, they then became the third tier of events and were discontinued following the 2006 season as the circuit moved exclusively to one-week Futures tournaments, the modern denomination for a satellite tournament.
A satellite tournament in pinball is modeled after those in poker. It is a smaller tournament that leads up to a major pinball championship, where participants have the opportunity to win their entry into the larger tournament. Applying the satellite tournament concept to pinball was first done by Northwest Pinball and Arcade Show in 2013 to promote both the show and the tournaments at the show. Since then, some other major tournaments have begun using the concept.
The playoffs, play-offs, postseason or finals of a sports league are a competition played after the regular season by the top competitors to determine the league champion or a similar accolade. Depending on the league, the playoffs may be either a single game, a series of games, or a tournament, and may use a single-elimination system or one of several other different playoff formats. Playoff, in regard to international fixtures, is to qualify or progress to the next round of a competition or tournament.
A bracket or tournament bracket is a tree diagram that represents the series of games played during a knockout tournament. Different knockout tournament formats have different brackets; the simplest and most common is that of the single-elimination tournament. The name "bracket" is American English, derived from the resemblance of the links in the tree diagram to the bracket punctuation symbol ] or [. The closest British term is draw, although this implies an element of chance, whereas some brackets are determined entirely by seeding.
A sports league is a group of individual athletes, sports teams or clubs who form a league to compete against each other and gain points in a specific sport. At its simplest, it may be a local group of amateur athletes who form teams among themselves and compete periodically, at its most complex, it can be an international professional league making large amounts of money and involving dozens of teams and thousands of players.
A single-elimination, knockout, or sudden-death tournament is a type of elimination tournament where the loser of each match-up is immediately eliminated from the tournament. Each winner will play another in the next round, until the final match-up, whose winner becomes the tournament champion(s). Each match-up may be a single match or several, for example two-legged ties in European sports or best-of series in North American pro sports. Defeated competitors may play no further part after losing, or may participate in "consolation" or "classification" matches against other losers to determine the lower final rankings; for example, a third place playoff between losing semi-finalists. In a shootout poker tournament, there are more than two players competing at each table, and sometimes more than one progresses to the next round. Some competitions are held with a pure single-elimination tournament system. Others have many phases, with the last being a single-elimination final stage, often called playoffs.
A double-elimination tournament is a type of elimination tournament competition in which a participant ceases to be eligible to win the tournament's championship upon having lost two games or matches. It stands in contrast to a single-elimination tournament, in which only one defeat results in elimination.
A round-robin tournament or all-play-all tournament is a competition format in which each contestant meets every other participant, usually in turn. A round-robin contrasts with an elimination tournament, wherein participants are eliminated after a certain number of wins or losses.
Repechage is a practice in series competitions that allows participants who failed to meet qualifying standards by a small margin to continue to the next round. A well-known example is the wild card system.
A Swiss-system tournament is a non-eliminating tournament format that features a fixed number of rounds of competition, but considerably fewer than for a round-robin tournament; thus each competitor does not play all the other competitors. Competitors meet one-on-one in each round and are paired using a set of rules designed to ensure that each competitor plays opponents with a similar running score, but does not play the same opponent more than once. The winner is the competitor with the highest aggregate points earned in all rounds. With an even number of participants, all competitors play in each round.
There are a number of formats used in various levels of competition in sports and games to determine an overall champion. Some of the most common are the single elimination, the best-of- series, the total points series more commonly known as on aggregate, and the round-robin tournament.
A wild card is a tournament or playoff berth awarded to a team or individual that does not qualify through an automatic bid. In some events, wildcards are chosen freely by the organizers. Other events have fixed rules. Some North American professional sports leagues compare the records of teams which did not qualify directly by winning a division or conference.
In sports, a bye is the preferential status of a player or team that is automatically advanced to the next round of a tournament without having to play an opponent in an early round.
In a group tournament, unlike a knockout tournament, there is no scheduled decisive final match. Instead, all the competitors are ranked by examining the results of all the matches played in the tournament. Typically, points are awarded for each match, with competitors ranked based either on total number of points or average points per match. A special type of group tournament is the Round-robin tournament, in which each player plays against every other player.
The women's beach volleyball tournament at the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing was held from August 9 to August 21, at the Beach Volleyball Ground at Chaoyang Park.
The men's Olympic beach volleyball tournament at the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing took place at the Beach Volleyball Ground at Chaoyang Park from August 9 to August 22.
The Inline Hockey World Championship is an annual inline hockey tournament organized by World Skate. Prior to the creation of World Skate in September 2017, the championship was administrated by the Comité International Roller In-Line Hockey (CIRILH), an organization and discipline of Fédération Internationale de Roller Sports (FIRS). It is the sport's highest-profile annual international tournament.
The men's tournament in volleyball at the 2016 Summer Olympics was the 14th edition of the event at the Summer Olympics, organised by the world's governing body, the FIVB, in conjunction with the IOC. It was held in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil from 7 to 21 August 2016.
The men's beach volleyball tournament at the 2016 Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, took place at the Copacabana Stadium. The competition was held from 6 to 18 August 2016. Twenty four teams with 48 athletes around the world competed for the gold medal.
The women's beach volleyball tournament at the 2016 Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, took place at the Copacabana Stadium. The competition was held from 6 to 17 August 2016. Twenty four teams with 48 athletes around the world competed for the gold medal.
The Northern and Southern Cups are the two major regional quidditch tournaments of the United Kingdom. Organised by QuadballUK, the tournaments serve both as qualification prerequisites for other tournaments, such as the European Quidditch Cup and the British Quidditch Cup alongside being their own stand alone tournaments. Regionals are often considered the most important tournaments of the year after the British Quidditch Cup and they serve as qualifiers for the latter tournament. Those teams that fail to qualify for BQC each season compete in the Development Cup instead. From 2021 onwards the tournaments have been held as a series of one-day fixtures exclusively for university teams with the equivalent Community League tournament held for community teams.
The StarCraft II StarLeague, also known as SSL or S2SL in short, was a large StarCraft II tournament series hosted by SPOTV GAMES that was played offline in South Korea. The tournament series was held in parallel with the Global StarCraft II League (GSL) as qualifiers for the StarCraft World Championship Series (WCS) held yearly at BlizzCon.