From: Rick Brown <guzzle <at> HOME <dot> COM>
Date: 2 jun 2000
Subject: Re: Tournament System - Knockdown or Swiss

Hi there!

Not wanting to argue about this because I'm probably not qualified, but I wanted
to point out some things:

'Shigeki Masui' wrote:
>
> 7) In the United States of America where Larry Kaufman live in, Major
> League Baseball, American Foot Ball and National Basket Ball,  all of
> them use knock down system to determine the Champion after the all year
> long league or swiss system tournament.
> I do not hear many complains from the sports journalists against the
> knockdown system for the championship tournaments. I think sports
> journalist will write anything if they could get public attention. Why
> is that?
> I have not seen many articles in sports news questioning the status of
> No.2 saying he did not play against one of the loser in semi final as
> Larry Kaufman raised. Is this because of  sportsman's spirit?
> In these most popular sports in USA, I do not see many sports writers
> claim that Swiss system must be applied instead of knockdown to
> determine the world champion.


I suspect that American Football uses the knockout system only because of the
time involved in playing and resting between games.  A football player can
really only play a game a week, so a swiss or round-robin event would take
months!

For baseball, the teams at least play a best-of-X number of games, so at least
in theory the better team will not get knocked out due to one loss.  The same
goes for basketball and hockey.

In tennis, the players play many games, called sets, so again they play more
than 1 game before thay are knocked out.

I suspect a knockout system would work well if the players played a best-of-X
series of matches.  Then 1 loss may not knock out the best player.  This was the
way the World Chess Champion used to be determined.

So, except for American Football, the teams are not knocked out after 1 game,
but after a series of games.  In amatuer sports, like baseball, they do only
play 1 game, but many tournaments are "double-elimination", so again a loss
early does not necessarily eliminate the team.  Also, I would think that in
amatuer sports like baseball, time again is a limiting factor, as the players
can really only play on the weekends, so a longer format just isn't practical.

Rick Brown