Pool Play Format Question

[herbie.brock]

Hey everyone,

We're hosting-for the second year-a middle school tournament in Mt. Vernon, Kentucky. If you search "Goddard" (we are the Rockcastle County Rockets, so you get the joke) on hsquizbowl, you'll find it easily and we'd love for your team to come.

That said, I have a problem that I'd like some input on.

We plan on doing pool play, reseeding, and then pool play again. What I'd like to do is to have some sort of championship match after the second set of pool play concludes. As of now, I'm thinking that I'd like that match to be the pool winner from the top pool and the pool winner from the second pool. I know there are pros and cons with it in general and for me and my tournament in particular. I'll list those below as well as reasons I think I want to do it and then I'd like any input on how to have a championship match after the second set of pool play that you guys can think of or any ideas in general you have after reading my pros for doing it.

Pros:
The entire tournament gets to see two good teams go head-to-head. This can encourage lower performers to step up their game.
We have a nice auditorium we'll use for awards (we have written assessment in the morning) and I'd like to have all those people there watching a match.
It can encourage teams in the second pool to play harder and keep them motivated through the second set of pool play.
A team that doesn't do so well in the morning still will have a chance to win it in the afternoon.

Cons:
It will make the day longer and with written assessment, and it's long already.
I'm not sure how to make it fair to the other teams in the top pool and how I can argue that their not playing the championship game is fair. Maybe that all those other teams in the top pool lost a match in pool play and the top two undefeated teams in pool play are the winners of the top pool and the second top pool means that they should play each other to see who was the best in the afternoon.
Since it's likely going to be the top team in the tournament vs. the seventh-best team in the tournament, it'll probably be a blowout anyway.

Ideas:
Maybe make the championship match shorter than a normal match to make things move quicker?
Not sure if there's a better way to have a championship match. The two top in the top pool will have played each other and that'll make a clear champion there.

Any help is appreciated.

[jonah]

You can distribute teams into the playoff pools so that the top two pools are balanced in strength (approximately). For example, if you have twelve teams in two prelim pools of six and after round 5 rank them A1, …, A6; B1, …, B6; and you want playoff pools of four, put A1, A4, B2, and B3 in playoff pool C; A2, A3, B1, and B4 in playoff pool D; and the rest in playoff pool E. Then the winners of C and D can fairly play each other in a final.

If you don't have balanced playoff pools, the scheme you outline is very unfair for the reasons you describe (mostly the second one and variants thereon), and I would expect most people to not believe the claimed advantages mitigate the unfairness.

[Cody]

If you did conventional pool play in the playoffs (instead of the equal strength pools that Jonah describes), you can simply mandate that a championship occur between the top 2 teams in the top pool at the end of the playoffs. If team A is ahead of team B by win-loss, team A wins by winning one game and team B wins by winning two games. If team A and team B are tied, then whoever wins the game wins the tournament. (There are other scenarios which I can run through but this is easy enough for demonstration purposes.)

The above format is a variation on the "advantaged final", which requires a team to finish with 2 more wins than the next best team in order to be declared the champion -- here, you force a championship game no matter what.

All that said, I have run many invitationals at VCU and while a few people generally stay for the championship game, it's not a marquee event the way you envision it -- and I think that's fine for most tournaments.

[herbie.brock]

Thanks, guys!

I like the balanced pools A and B best and I think I'll go with it. Especially since it has more teams "going for the gold".

I see what you're saying about the "marquee event", but since we are having written assessment, most teams will be staying.

I like the advantaged final setup, but everyone waiting to see if there is another match at the end of the day that they'll have to sit through is probably going to be a bummer for most not involved. In Kentucky, we do double elimination brackets in Governor's Cup and at the end of a long day, everyone is cheering for the team with no losses to beat the team with one because they know if the latter wins, they'll have to sit through another match.


Thanks again for your help! I wouldn't have thought of any of this.