Tournament Seeding 101

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#splatoon3 #bracketology #seeding

[@RedOphiuchus]

I think seeding is a good thing in general but I think the TO made the right call to place you against your friend round 1 in a tournament against kids lmao Makes it so no kid gets stomped out of the tournament round 1 and halves the amount of kids that gets stomped out throughout the tournament.

[@blank_ivysaur]

Assuming there’s no stakes yeah

[@TGCPhilip]

I can't believe no one has accepted his... beautiful artwork. Having dedicated so much time to art, I am truly uh.. disgusted by this reaction!

[@alexrod9271]

Gem MS Paint Stream! I want it!

[@phighter]

@@alexrod9271 I would love that

[@residentfacehead3465]

Another advantage to the seeded format. Having the best players/teams somewhat spread apart makes the tournement get more hype as it goes along. Instead of "oh they beat their biggest rival, now its 4 easy sets till grands." The easier less interesting curbstomp battles take place early and by the end its two (usually) fairly matched teams with everything on the line.

[@MrCactuar13]

That's fine for the viewers but awful for the competitors. Really this system is a holdover from traditional sports where seeds are rigged I mean calculated to ensure that the biggest players with the biggest sponsors capture the biggest audience during broadcast. Unfortunately for everyone else it basically means you're always going to be playing at a huge disadvantage with no real room for improvement until you're lucky enough to be matched against a bracket of similarly skilled players.

[@TsuchinokoIsARealAnimal]

The alternative is even worse for competitors, though. Why would you ever want to improve in a setting where consistently being the second best player actively hurts your tournament placings (and earnings, if applicable)?

[@MudakTheMultiplier]

​@@MrCactuar13I've been to a couple live CSGO tournaments where the semifinals was a super tense and close game between rival teams, and then finals was just a curb stomp and was a total let down. If the stomp had been semis then there's still that tension about how the rest of the tournament will go, but once a team is up by half of what it takes to win totally uncontested it makes the event kinda boring.

[@gavinyeet5821]

@@MrCactuar13 What are you talking about? Like, legitimately, what on earth are you talking about? At least in America there are 4 major professional sports that attract the largest audience: Football, basketball, baseball, and hockey, in no particular order. In all 4 of these the playoffs are bracket of some sort where the seeding is determined by record against other teams in the league; there is absolutely no way to rig the bracket except by rigging the games of the regular season, which is an entirely separate issue. As for amateur, college, sports in America they follow fairly similar structure. The biggest example of deciding a championship for college sports is of course March Madness, a 68 team single elimination bracket where teams are seeded 1-16 in 4 mini brackets that meet in the final four. While there is absolutely a large degree of sports politics in deciding the seeding here it is based most heavily on some combination of record and strength of opponent. However, 13 of the last 20 both men's and women's champions have been a 1 seed, although the women's tournament hasn't had the exact same format the entire time. Football is really weird, but generally speaking one of the best teams wins, but not always the absolute best. Overall, I still have no clue what you mean, but seeding in the way discussed in the video almost always gives the most accurate results. Plus, if a team with a lower seed wins, say an 8 beating a 1, then their next game will be better, going up against a 4 or 5 using the video's bracket. All in all, Gem is 100% right about why seeding exists and it fulfills its role fairly well; not perfectly, but it's the best system available.

[@nmotschidontwannagivemyrea8932]

@@MrCactuar13 You're proposing that a system where the second-best players come in last is somehow worse for players?

[@LuichoX203]

im glad you didnt even mention splatoon in anything except the ending of this video so next time someone doesnt understand seeding on my local smash community i can link them to this lmao

[@SquidSchool]

I keep saying player instead of team haha, you know I learned this from Smash

[@crazfamily6931]

I look at all of this as someone who wants to put the effort into splat 3 competitively. But then i look at my life and realize i am NEVER gonna be able to put the amount of time required because of what i have going on in life in general. Anyone else can relate?

[@niicespiice]

i play 2 hours a day (averaging it out), and even though i think i'm improving, i'm still low-level. i have no idea how people get so good!!

[@blank_ivysaur]

@@niicespiice when you don’t have time to practice it helps to think. Learning to be better at learning helps you improve at a faster rate.

[@notarat9303]

Definitely relate lol and for me I also just cannot play a video game for too long without my brain frying. I just don't have that much concentration juice in my brain lmao (it also doesn't help that I'm working and going to college at the same time but I know other pros like chara can still do it idk it's probably just dif priorities)

[@statmango]

At some point, you just have to decide priorities. For me, Splatoon is just a hobby, and I share my Switch with 3 other people, so my time on it is very limited (maybe an hour per week). So I'm good enough to beat my kids' friends, but will never be top 500 in the world. And I'm okay with that. :-)

[@nicolasdevincentis6381]

Far too much tbh. As somone who is still in school, I hardly have any time at all to play splatoon, let alone join a team and play in tournaments.

[@eseren]

I've had this happen a few times. We aren't the best by any means but we can hold our ground and it's frustrating being put up against the winner of the tournament first when we have won against teams who made it much further

[@luin6788]

love to see gem responding to fan demands (me and one other guy) for the shift away from Microsoft paint edit: NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

[@PickPig]

17:42 POV: the speed of sound has become 5x the speed of light

[@SquidSchool]

Ah crud, I thought I fixed that. Glad it got pointed out or it might have showed up in the next video too

[@DallinBackstrom]

double elimination is great for tournaments. I come at it from the viewer perspective, and from that side, it's always insanely hype to see someone run it all the way back through the losers bracket to make it to grand finals. Seeding is never going to be perfect so having that extra layer will make the results more fair and more consistent, which is nice, but it also gives viewers a second chance to root for their favorite player or team. Of course it takes more time (& money, in the case of big events) to run a double-elimination tourney. So there's a trade-off that has to be made, from the perspective of the organizer.

[@benro6564]

I enjoy pools systems. at least at the tournaments I go to, Pools are randomly decided, and seeding only happens at later stages when only the better players are left. That way, the power gap between high and low seed is significantly lower.

[@Dwinner9000]

What's mathematically interesting is that a poorly sorted 8 player triple elim tournament would finish with the expected results for all players. 8 being 2^3, the exponent represents the amount of elims; double, triple, quadruple, etc. needed to negate poor bracket sorting.

[@nmotschidontwannagivemyrea8932]

Something I didn't realize at first was that the numbers you were using were supposed to be a ranking of how good the teams are expected to be. It took me a bit to figure out why the arbitrary ordering of the numbers mattered

[@SquidSchool]

This video was a follow up to the video on tournament formats where that was explained

[@KindMurderer]

Well, when a teacher draws diagrams or writes formulas/rules as you go, you get more involved in the process, because you're on the same page. And it's easier to start taking notes too. So it's always nice to see you making notes on the screen, even if they....um... little bit of... cring- .... Ok, maybe it's worth checking other programs for drawing tho

[@Chocomint_Queen]

As a former Magic the Gathering judge, I'm surprised that I only knew like... half of this? Like, I've seeded all of these types of tournaments, both manually and automatically, and I _thought_ I'd been taught why and how, but now I think, perhaps not as well as I could've been.

[@Lerker2000]

This is also why double elim tournaments are the standard in most 1v1s haha.

[@TroyVan6654]

Sounds like single-elimination tournaments are not fun for the bottom players, because they're basically cannon fodder. What's the point of entering in tournaments with basically no chance of winning even one game? I like rating-based matchmaking more as a semi-casual player. Imagine playing a series (a "season" perhaps) of games against closely-matched opponents, keeping a Elo or Glicko rating along the way. And when you're done, you get a rating showing how you're stacked up against the field. Much more meaningful, and players of all levels get to have fun.

[@critttler]

You really dont see single elimination at all in competitive esports tournaments that new players can enter for basically this reason. If its seen, its generally a "top cut" where theres a previous swiss or round robin round that they use beforehand.

[@SquidSchool]

As mentioned in the previous video, SE is all but never run by itself. This is why I talk about the advantages of double Elim right after, because it's more common. It's just simpler to explain with single elim

[@flango348]

That’s why you don’t hold single elimination tournaments when you have more then 4 people.

[@SEA-53]

SE makes more sense at the end of seasonal league play in which seeding is earned by virtue of past performance, but can reset seasonally. Seeding is also more carefully performed in this context because of better information (again, past performance).

[@Stephen-Fox]

The thing I will always find amusing about American sports is that they insist on concluding seasons of their leagues with a single elimination tournament, despite leagues (usually) being a very complete round robin, often a double round robin, meaning that you'd get more accurate results for the season by just using ... But they want the _drama_ of a single elimination tournament. ...And then they go and seed the thing because they want to minimize the chance that the team that did best in the league of the top 4-8 will lose because that would be 'unfair.' If you want a fair result, just use the results of the bloody round robin you've been running for the past half year. (Meanwhile, the English football pyramid, has two things going on, the league, where the results of it are left as is and the team that wins the league just wins the league and wins that trophy, and also a single elimination tournament with all the teams in the top 9 levels of the pyramid - I think last season that was 732 teams - where the only advantage being higher in the leagues give is a few byes. Beyond that, the matchups are randomly determined each round. Maximizing the _drama_ (and randomly determining which of the smaller teams gets the huge influx of cash that comes from even _playing_ against one of the biggest teams out there in that context due to their share of the television rights) while also not risking corrupting the results of the _double round robin_ in determining the best team in the country that season.) Like, yeah, if you want to maximize the chance of a single elimination tournament producing accurate results, come up with a seeding process is a way to do that (Though how seeding should work can get... Weird... Particularly in scenes scattered five ways to the hell, to the point that often events can have on site qualification and seeding from that qualification process - NES Tetris, for example, for the CTWC, gives prospective competitors an hour to score as many maxouts (999999 points) as they can, with their highest non-maxout score - their kicker - being used to break ties. (it used to be 'highest score with second highest being used to tiebreak the couple of people who are capable of getting maxouts in qualifiers'. CTWC 2022 saw the top two seeds getting 14 maxouts, and at least one maxout being required to qualify. That scene is exploding in skill atm and was already doing before the discovery of the new rolling technique). But if you've got the time to do a round robin format anyway, and want to maximize the chance of that telling you the best team in that event? Don't stick a bloody single-elimination tournament on top of that, even if you're using the round-robin to seed it. And this is more of a rant about traditional sports than eSports which rarely have the sort of rigorous round robin league that's giving a definitive answer to 'who's the best team' going on alongside these more chaotic single or double elimination tournaments which, as you covered last tournament structure episode, are incapable of answering that question but we have them because they're quicker than round robins or even swiss. (And don't get me started on the refusal of American sports to just let a tie be a bloody tie, instead insisting of - in some cases - infinite overtime, outside of an elimination tournament context)

[@StarshadowMelody]

You're right! It doesn't seem very fair that the bottom player got seeded w/ the top! Neither does what happened prior. Round Robin FTW.

[@StarshadowMelody]

... I think I should clarify I had no idea what a pool was when I said this halfway through the video. No I didn't watch the last one, I don't actually know why this one grabbed me when that one didn't.

[@Cakeycakers]

How would you determine the rankings for seeding like who's the best and who's the worst if you don't have an answer for it, would round robins solve that?

[@BlobRoss_splat]

This is a lot of math for an English teacher. Impressive. 😂

[@TheNeonWyvern]

Why isn't 1v5, 2v6, 3v7, 4v8 used in bracket like it is in swiss?

[@a_guy_in_orange7230]

Its ok Gem, we can put the vacation picture riiiiight up here on the fridge, so everyone can see it.

[@Dreykopff]

What about matching people just randomly instead of any of the suggested 2 fixed and extreme orders? Of course good seeding is the fairest in the grand scheme of things, but it is rather elitist and good at making sure that whoever is at the bottom end will stay at the bottom end. If we have double elimination with like 256 people or whatever, poor guy at 256 will start with the biggest non-game in history and then get another non-game because the next guy in losers' bracket is also probably way too far ahead to make an upset realistically achievable. And what I'm then arriving at is really just wanting to seed the top but not too much else. It shouldn't be impossible to allow people to experience some competitive games but still make them work for the prizes.

[@benro6564]

That's what randomized pools or qualifiers are for. If you get past it by skill, you get a high seed. If you get past it by luck, you get a low seed.

[@RiahGreen]

YOOOOO YOU MADE THE SEEDING VID Edit: I'm extremely hype for tent gaming content

[@glyncoakley9819]

Okay, but how do you *assign* seeding when you don't know for sure who is the best? Or Xth best or whatever. Like, okay, Starburst is The Best, sure, but how do you as a TO determine who's seed 4? X-power? That's going to miss team synergy at least, though maybe Splatoon teams don't last long enough for that to be a major factor? Do you go off of tournament win record? That's a lot of research and also has problems with fluid/new teams. LUTI ranks? Obviously in reality this is an art form not a science, and you use a mix of lots of stuff, but I'd be curious to see a discussion about what you think is best/realistic and how as a TO you handle that both practically and ethically. Like, if you're good friends with team Y, how do you account for your internal bias towards them? What exactly is the bar for "good enough" seeding?

[@Cakeycakers]

Did you find an answer?

[@vexywexy]

I assume in that case we'll have to opt for randomised seed until we have enough data.

[@Cakeycakers]

@@vexywexy would round robin work for gathering data?

[@vexywexy]

@@Cakeycakers it should work but round robin takes a lot of time to run. Make sure you have the time first. In some tournaments, I think they use "pools" in SE format with randomised seeding to determine the proper seeding and later down the line they'll go for DE with proper seeding.

[@fernandoportal5422]

Nice to know

[@HAX3MEW]

What’s the website that you used for the bracket?

[@SquidSchool]

I mention it right at the beginning, it's "Challonge"

[@HAX3MEW]

@@SquidSchool ok thanks! I’ve been hosting tournaments for a while and they have always felt a little biased and unfair. I this will help make it better. Thanks for the video!

[@Shrewdilus]

Seeding doesn’t really sit right with me. You’re setting it up so that the people you expect to win are more likely to win. In your example, you used numbers to indicate the skill level of each team/player, but is skill really that straight forward? One team might have a strategy that works really well against one team but not another. Some people excel at different areas from another person. I think the top team in a tournament should have to prove each tournament why they’re the best, not have the tournament set up in a way where they have an easier time making it to finals because you assume that they should.

[@Sporbb]

I'm curious to see how robust seeding is to imperfect information. How wrong does your prior ranking have to be before it starts messing up the results?

[@blank_ivysaur]

It takes only one very good player in a 20 man bracket with a poor seed to drastically alter results of a bracket from what I’ve seen with smash tournaments run by people who only seed based on their own tournament results.

[@blank_ivysaur]

Minor differences in seeds don’t make a difference but if you put someone that should be 1-3 in the 12-20 spot it will mess everything up

[@Technically_Techy]

Is it very possible in the splat community to enter ur 1st tournament and be in last seed and ur 1st ever match is against the 1st seed team?

[@dogemon5393]

Sure, but it’ll only be the top seed of whatever your division is, not the top see in your entire region. And your also not likely to be the bottom seed

[@johndronio]

awesome

[@Nicolas-qc3jf]

Here's how it should work: Upper bracket - includes tier 1 and tier 2 teams. First round places tier 1 teams against tier 2 teams to weed out the weaker. Lower bracket - includes tier 3 and amateur teams against each other. On round 2 the stronger tier 1 and tier 2 teams move forward and the losing ones move down to fight against the winning teams in the lower bracket. By round 3-4 we should have the best teams of each tier preparing to fight against each other.

[@Jimblemimble]

damn

[@pollymuff0895]

🐑🐑🐑