Interesting. Every time I’ve watched the world cup there were 4 teams in a bracket and you played the 3 teams in that bracket. Then top 2 moved on. The conversation has been about the people in your bracket so world cup is a perfect example of what I’d like (you play 100 percent of the people in your group).
For the others, it’s not a 100 percent match but is 80+ so you are playing the same people in your group/division.
I’d like to know an example to where you play 50 percent or less of the same people in the group/division your are in, where playoff births come just from your group/division.
But theres only 4 teams per group in the world cup, lol. The world cup probably isn’t a great example anyway because there’s like 2 years of qualifying that happens before hand that no one really pays attention to. In the examples of football, soccer, and baseball mentioned above, they have literally months long seasons to work with (nearly half a year for baseball!!!).
@85vett, perhaps something you aren’t considering or fully appreciating is that any tournament format is butting up against dozens of practical constraints and considerations (not to mention the limits of what players are interested in or willing to do). Tournament directors don’t have 6 months of qualifying time and infinite resources to work with. They have 1 to 3 days, limited space, games, and budget. Every hypothetical knob you adjust has an effect somewhere else. Increase the number of rounds? Well that decreases the number of qualifying sessions you can run and the number of players you can support. Ultimately, you are forced to weigh out different options that don’t always add up to a 100% ideal perfect test of skill. And even if you could, is that what you want? High score qualifying is probably the best format for doing what you want in terms of placing everyone on a balanced playing field, but that’s boring af and a PITA to administer.
As others have mentioned, I get the point that some players might have an easier path to victory. IMO, the influence on the results is minimal. Moreover, these issues don’t disappear in swiss formats. You could still randomly get placed on the turd games that you suck at, placed against a guy who spends 3 hours a day on the very the game you’re playing, or against keith elwin who happened to get a few house balls in the rounds before.