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BGonline.org Forums
Alternative to byes
Posted By: Chuck Bower
Date: Sunday, 1 May 2011, at 6:27 p.m.
I'm wondering if there is a reasonable alternative to byes. Here I'm not overly concerned about two issues that are often brought up (duration of event and collusion). Here is something I thought of, but maybe there's a better way.
Suppose you have N players which is not a power of 2: 2^(n+1) < N < 2^n. Play a round robin and eliminate N - 2^n [or even N - 2^(n-1)] and have a standard knockout/elimination after that. This doesn't make a lot of sense for N=3, but consider N=6. Five rounds of Round-Robin eliminates either one or three; then one or two rounds of knockout find the winner. (For N=5 it takes the same amount of time because each player must sit out one of the RR rounds.)
Although I said time wasn't particularly of concern, this does seem to take a lot of it. The length of the RR increases m/l linearly. You could truncate the RR before every pairing is completed, but for a field of players with significant discrepancies in skill level, that seems to throw more 'luck of the draw' back into the mix.
Any alternate (bye-less) ideas to either improve this or replace it?
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