An improvement on the Swiss system using in tournament seeding, examples and pictures included.

After using the Swiss format in a couple of tournaments some concerns about it have been brought up.

One that comes up often lately is that it can be advantageous for certain teams if they get lucky with the draft. Most of the time when this concern is brought up people say that teams should be reseeded. This could be an answer, but the problem then becomes: what seeding do we use? Since Majors use a legend system it is impossible to go off recent performing. In this post I will discuss using in tournament seeding and reseeding versus the current adaption of the Swiss system.

 

In tournament seeding

I think it is best explained using pictures. This text segment is just a small explanation of the system. I will later go in the rounds individually and explain them more. In tournament seeding means that after each round teams aren't put together into 1 big pool but instead teams keep a hierarchy within the system. Right now teams that go 1-1 go into 1 big pool where they get a randomly drawn opponent. With in tournament seeding the system sort of remembers the history of the previous match. 1-1 teams don't go into 1 big pool but instead they go into a 1-1 upper pool and 1-1 lower pool. For the next round teams that are in the same pool can not face each other meaning a 1-1U faces a 1-1L seeded team.

Current system, this picture is from the Eleague major, credit to HLTV.

New proposed system

I tried using the same layout as HLTV so you can better understand what I mean.

I am no graphic designer, so it can look a bit ugly.

 

Round 1

Exactly the same as before

Round 2

Exactly the same as before

Round 3

This is where it starts to differ. In round 3 the teams in 1-1 upper can only face teams from 1-1 lower.

Round 4

Round 4 is a weird one, since there are 2 teams in 2-1 upper and 4 in 2-1 lower, 2 teams from 2-1 lower will face eachother, same goes for 1-2 teams.

Round 5

In round 5 it evens out again.

 

Examples using the proposed system vs the old one

A great example to look at is the PGL Major round 3. Fnatic, Astralis, C9, G2 all won in round 1 but lost in round 2. This means that after winning in round 1 they face better opponents since they face other 1-0 teams. All 4 teams lose however in the second round making their record 1-1. Now PGL drafts round 3 and the following matchups come out. Fnatic vs Astralis and C9 vs G2. In no way is this fair because they faced better opponents and now just got unlucky with the draft. My new proposed system makes it impossible for them to match up. The 4 teams would have gone into the 1-1 upper halve and would have been matched against 1-1 lower.

 

tl;dr

Just look at the pictures, I proposed a small improvement for the already great Swiss system.

I do hope atleast some people read this because I think it is an improvement and this deserves some discussion.

Apologies for any writing errors, english is not my first language.