Triple-elimination tournament

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A triple-elimination tournament is a competition in which each player or team gets an allowance of two losses before the third loss eliminates them.

A triple-elimination tournament is broken into three brackets, the Upper Bracket, the Center Bracket, and Lower Bracket. After the first round, which takes place in the Upper Bracket, the winners progress through the Upper Bracket while the losers proceed into the Center Bracket. The Upper Bracket is conducted in the same manner as a single-elimination tournament, except that the losers of each round "drop down" into the Center Bracket. The Center Bracket is conducted in a similar fashion to a double-elimination tournament, with the losers dropping down again into the Lower Bracket. The Lower Bracket also works as a single-elimination tournament, with the losers being eliminated from the entire competition.

Again, as with the single- and double-elimination tournaments, most often the number of competitors is equal to a power of two (8, 16, 32, etc) so that there are an even number of competitors at every round.

1 Conducting a triple elimination
2 Pros and Cons
3 Variations
- 3.1 Balanced triple-elimination tournament
4 Other Tournament Systems
5 References
6 External links

[edit] Conducting a triple elimination

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A triple-elimination tournament can be run from a chart or managed using cards. With a card method the structure of the tournament develops round by round and cannot be predicted in advance. The Tournament Director has certain aims and criteria which guide the pairing of opponents.

[edit] Pros and Cons

Benefits of the triple-elimination tournament, when compared to the single or double-elimination tournament, include:

Participants stay in the tournament longer. No player is eliminated until the 3rd round of matches. In the 8 player version, only one player is eliminated in the 3rd round.
The winner of the tournament can be considered a more valid winner because a dominant player is unlikely to lose 3 times before the tournament ends.
Participants and spectators sometimes find the more complex tournament structure to be fun.

Drawbacks of the traditional triple-elimination tournament include:

May take a long time to complete.
The winner of the Upper Bracket must wait to play until a single opponent emerges from the Center and Lower Brackets. In the 8 player version, the winner of the Upper Bracket is idle for 5 to 6 rounds of play in the middle of the tournament. A player who wins in the first two rounds can win the tournament playing as few as 4 games total, while a player who loses in the first two rounds must play 12 games total to win the tournament. The balanced variation attempts to alleviate this problem (see Variations section below).

[edit] Variations

[edit] Balanced triple-elimination tournament

The balanced variation is a bracket arrangement that is not strictly divided into 3 brackets based on number of losses^[1]. Players with different numbers of losses can play each other in any round. A goal of the variation is that no player sits idle for more than one round consecutively. The added complexity of the brackets is handled by using "if necessary" matches and by allowing the last one or two rounds to be double-elimination rounds. The flexible approach allows practical bracket designs to be made for any number of competitors including odd numbers (9, 10, 11, 12, 13, etc.).