Picking your tournament type is a delicate decision. You have to balance three key issues to maximize competitor enjoyment: competition level, number of matches played, and administrative resources (duration of tournament, officiating staff, courts and fields).

And never before has their been a worse tournament type at balancing these issues than Single Elimination. One loss and you’re out, el fin. There are no second chances. Even the best and highest seeded team in a tournament can have a bad match. But your job as a tournament director is to guarantee that the best team is the team that wins first place.

Is a single loss a significant enough factor to state without variability or doubt that a losing team is not indeed the best team? As Tournologists, we would say no. But we’re not here to make that decision for you. We’re here to provide you with the tools to make that decision for yourself.

Quick Reference:

• Length: One of the shortest tournament types, will eliminate teams quickly and leave them hungry for more matches. This tournament type has fewer teams playing with every round that goes by. Works best as a second-phase to a qualification round, usually a Round Robin.
• Size: Works best with a number of competitors that is a power of two, so that you don’t have a lot of byes (a match in which one team has no opponent and wins automatically). So tournament sizes of 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256 teams, et cetera. The closer to the power of two without going over will minimize the amount of byes. So, a tournament with 15 teams will have much fewer byes than a tournament with 17 teams. For that reason, many tournament directors find it easier to truncate down a tournament when they’ve gone over a power of two, rather than attempt to add teams to reach the next power of two.
• Examples: National Football League post-season. NCAA College Basketball March Madness.