Ideal number of rounds for round robin High School Tournamen

[Matthew D]

The discussion about how long that the Alabama Tournament last this weekend got me thinking.
What is the best number of rounds for a tournament. Most of us play fees of $50 or more for a tournament? At what point do you think you got your money's worth?
Personally, I think that at least 7 or 8 rounds with single elimination playoffs to determine the overall winner. JV division winners need to be included as part of the playoff pool also.

[First Chairman]

Well, for round-robin, the number seems obvious to me. :) I think 5 to 10 seems like a solid and worthwhile number of games for a team that's spending a good morning and afternoon at a tournament.

[David Riley]

I think the answer varies with the territory. How long do your tournaments usually run? Here, we would consider eight or nine rounds (20/20 tossups/bonuses; without playoffs) to be the maximum; longer (about 10) if the rounds are NAQT style timed rounds with playoffs. At any rate, coaches and teams start to complain if the tournament runs longer than 6pm.

[Matthew D]

My aim usually is to have everyone including my team on the road home by 4:30 pm at the latest but I have had 1 middle school tournament that ran long and I have to say, I wasn't very happy as the TD.

[Irreligion in Bangladesh]

I'm planning some sort of round robin playoffs for my December tournament - by using NAQT's format, I'm hoping to get through 7 morning rounds and at least 3 afternoon rounds. Personally, I would want no less than 10 NAQT format games, and likely more if the moderators are good enough to plow through them quickly enough.

Here's a situation - let's say you have 8 playoff teams and 3 playoff packets. Your options would appear to be 2 pools of 4, a championship pool and a consolation pool, or single elimination 8 team bracket, with or without a consolation/losers bracket.

By splitting into pools, all of the top 4 get a chance to play each other and you guarantee the bottom 4 teams 3 games a piece, something you don't get in a single elimination without consolation brackets. By using single elimination, the 5-8 teams get a chance to upset a top 4 team and place higher, but it opens up the possibility of the two best teams not placing 1-2 if they meet in the semis.

Which option seems best?

[DumbJaques]

As a player, I always want the most games against the best competition (or the best competition we as a team have earned the right to face). For this reason I favor some kind of round-robin within the playoffs, though I certainly understand that at the end of the day, it can get. . . quite tedious.

I'm planning a round robin structure for at least the Saturday tournament for the Weekend of Quizbowl. In addition to dividing the field into two divisions based on whether or not a team has qualified for nationals, teams will be divided into brackets. A certain percentage of the top teams will make the first playoff bracket, and so on. This will likely end up with something like 7-8 prelim games and then 4ish playoff games (teams would only play teams they hadn't already faced in the playoff round robin). I'll admit that for most tournaments a possibility of 12 games is a whole lot to get done, so that's not really practical for everyone (I'm banking on the fact that since it's a two-day event, teams won't be driving 3+ hours home Saturday night).

I think that if you're not going to do swiss pairing you really owe it to teams to give them more than 1 game against like competition, but again, that's based mostly on a player's perspective.

[QB-dinosaur]

Over here in Southern California, we've always tried to give teams as many rounds as possible (we charge $100+ per team). The most we've ever had was 15 rounds of round-robin, and we got out by 6 PM.

Although sometimes the field didn't have an ideal number (17 is a horrible number), most players seemed content with 10-15 rounds. We always start at 9 AM sharp and get 5-6 rounds in before lunch.

I once ran a tournament with 21 teams, so I split it into two brackets (10 and 11). I felt bad for the bracket of 10 because they only played 9 matches. But, at the end of the day, nobody complained. So 9 is the fewest number of games we've ever had.

We never do single-elimination playoffs here (at least not the type that involves more than 2 teams). If we split brackets, the top team from each bracket plays against each other for 1st and 2nd place. The second place team from each bracket plays each other for 3rd and 4th place. It's always a one-game playoff because we'd be running out of packets. We try to do the playoffs after a brief "awards ceremony" for top individual scorers during the round robins, but that doesn't always get done in time.

[Sen. Estes Kefauver (D-TN)]

This isn't about the number of games, but instead for playoffs that seems like a not very great idea tohave the top from each bracket play the championship and the 2nd in each bracket play the 3rd place game. That just seems bad because what if the best 2 teams happen to be in the same bracket, which is definitely a possibility. Instead it makes more sense to have the top 2 from each bracket playoff, or at least it does to me.

[Mike Bentley]

We do single elmination playoffs at our high school tournaments and most of the teams seem to like it. Teams that are on winning streaks tend to enjoy continuing to play into the late afternoon and early evening more than teams that have been losing.

Overall we usually get around 11 rounds done in total, with each team being guaranteed around 7 rounds.

When I tried to increase the palyoff rounds by one last spring, it didn't go over that well as a lot of teams were kept later than they expected (especially because we had some big screw-ups in stats so the seeding took a long time to get worked out).

[Frater Taciturnus]

Losing a lot made me appreciate double elimination a lot. I generally think that if the more you pay, the more rounds you should get. If you pay 50 bucks, 5-6 guarenteed rounds is great. $100, and I'm wanting 9 rounds.

[cvdwightw]

I would think a decent benchmark would be to divide the base fee by 10, then guarantee that many rounds. Above 8 rounds or so, time is more crucial than number of rounds. If you can't reasonably expect to be done with 12+ rounds in by 5:00, you probably shouldn't schedule that many rounds.

For playoffs, I personally prefer cross-bracket play, e.g. the top 4 in one bracket play the top 4 in the other bracket, next 4 play next 4, etc. all the way down. Winner has best overall record followed by best record against the other seven teams in the bracket. I find this has two distinct advantages:

1) Good teams do not get overly penalized for running into a ridiculously hot team early (in single elimination, they go home, in this format, it's just one loss); nor are they penalized for slightly imbalanced brackets (if the two best teams end in the same bracket, they don't have to play each other twice).

2) Every team, no matter where they finish, gets an opportunity to play meaningful games against teams of similar skill level. A team that goes 0-fer in the round robin doesn't just go home or get destroyed by the #1 seed, it plays teams from other brackets that did just as poorly.

In the end, number of teams and time limit should be what determines round robin games and playoff structure.