I use the automatic tie formula within matchplay to decide ties and it works super well and from a true maths and statistical point of view it is completely fair.
Yes I have sympathy if such a rule is not made clear at the start; so I make it clear that’s what I’m using and point folks at the matchplay documentation if they have questions.
In addition to using Swiss tiered means you are playing folks who are performing similarly to how you are performing and thus if you beat those people why play them again in a tie?! - you have beat them already. Using a single game as a decider rather than the previous X rounds of how they have performed seems more unfair to me. Note though even with a mathematical formula ties are still possible if not as probable.
If you want to avoid the computer picking the other person then play better!
Not having to run ties means I can have more folks qualify in the final and run a more interesting final format.
I don’t mind either way, and there are plenty of examples throughout all of sports and competition. Of the major teams sports, only baseball will do one game tiebreaks. NFL, NBA, NHL all go with a series of mathematical calculations based on a subset of a season’s statistics to break ties. I’m not a fan of the Pinburgh style so much because I think it should take all rounds into account, but really, as long as it’s defined up front I’m cool.
That one is a hard one to swallow as I believe I did. It wasn’t swiss so we didn’t play most of the same people nor the same caliber of players. We only faced 5 of the same players of which I beat all 5 of those players, the other person only beat 4. I had a stronger strength of players as well. We both wound up with the same number of points, both had a single second and a single 3rd. We both achieved 14.5 points and I believe this tie breaker position wound up 16th or 17th seed out of 24 so we both “played better” than several people that made it in based off other rounds.
Is what it is at this point. I’d just rather see a playoff game than a who started with the most points format chose the winner of an entry position into finals.
Chiming in with me POV… I would 100% approve of ties being broken and ranks being assigned based on actual play.
Seeing folks with exactly the same number of points at an event being ranked differently, or folks being ranked by how they seeded into a semifinals instead of how they played in them have personally effected me both positively and negatively and I didn’t feel good about it in either scenario.
There is a simple way to do two-way tiebreakers in 4-person groups without having an additional game: head to head record. Whenever it’s a 3-game round, that will always work, e.g. 4-1-1 vs 2-2-2, the 2-2-2 wins since they finished higher two games out of three. Ditto 3-2-1-0 scoring with 2-1-1 vs 1-3-0, the 2-1-1 wins. Granted this doesn’t address the question of how many other players you beat, but then none of these systems take into account what the victory margins were. Last place may have 80% of what first did, or 2nd place may have 20% of what first did, but neither “wins” scoring system takes that into account. Thus, how many players did you beat may not be any better representation of how well you played relative to the other person you’re tied with.
As for the Houston situation, I would argue that any unbalanced system like this or Pinburgh where both who you play and what you play vary widely should have a full-game tiebreaker. Too many things are unequal to use points to decide, even if you use points from other rounds, positions, etc. You can even make a case that many players with one point fewer than enough to qualify actually played better than some who did. I wouldn’t go down that road, but it does support having a more rigorous tiebreak when the points are even.