The best tournament format for the better player to win

[<<] [>>] by Kevin Carter
25th November 2000 (Other News)

David Appleton's study, which was published (alas not electronically) in 'The Statistician' in 1995. After much analysis he concludes that the tournament formats which provide the highest probabilities that the best player will win are, in order:

1. double round-robin (but which suffers the disadvantage of needing so many games to complete it)
2. seeded draw and process (which has fallen out of fashion, but clearly has a lot to commend it)
3. best of 3 KO
4. unseeded draw and process
5. single round robin
6. seeded KO
7. swiss
8. unseeded KO
9. blocks (e.g. four American blocks, with winners going through to SFs)

There are other variations - for instance, a seeded Bo3 d&p will be the best of all (and in a field of 16 would require the finalists to play between 12 and 27 games - compared to 30 in a double round robin).

Louis Nell's excellent analysis