How to Organize a Tournament

I noticed a recent post on the IW site about how CPA Central scheduled an end of year tournament in which ACP and IW faced each other in the first round.  Agreeing with IW, yes, that sounds like a fail.  That means one of the top two armies will be eliminated in the first round…

Here is how you organize a tournament.  A typical tournament is organized by some sort of rank.  The Top 10 Army list seems like a good ranking system.  In a tournament (take the NCAA Men’s Basketball tournament for example), the top ranked team plays the lowest ranked team, the second highest ranked team plays the second lowest ranked team and so on.  If the tournament consists of the Top 8 armies, it would look something like this:

#1 plays #8

#2 plays #7

#3 plays #6

#4 plays #5

If we were to organize this by the current Top 8, our tournament would look like this:

Round 1

Bracket 1

ACP (1) vs. UMA (8)

Nachos (3) vs. Tacos (6)

Bracket 2

IW (2) vs. FW (7)

HSA (4) vs. GW (5)

Assuming that the higher ranked army won in every battle, Round 2 would look like this:

Round 2

ACP (1) vs. Nachos (3)

IW (2) vs.  HSA (4)

The Finals would then look like this:

Finals

ACP (1) vs. IW (2)

Doesn’t it make sense for the Top 2 armies to meet in the Finals?  That seems like a better plan to me.

Note: This is how we will organize the Christmas Tournment.  Don’t worry about who won what battles here, this was an example.  It is perfectly possible for a 6th ranked army to upset a 3rd ranked army, etc.  It should be a lot of fun.  Hope this helps future tournament-schedulers.

~Boomer