Canadian finals format

The Canadian Finals Format was invented by Peter McCorquodale for use at VETO. Most American quizbowl players agree that it is a terrible idea and should never be used at an American tournament.

Format

In the Canadian Finals Format, the top two teams in the tournament by record play a best two-out-of-three final, with the team that has a head-to-head advantage getting the advantage. Thus, the team that won the head-to-head matchup has to win only one game, while the other team has to win two. Presumably, if the two teams did not play each other or split their games, then there is only a one game final.

Criticism of the Format

The format was brought to American eyes after the 2008 incarnation of VETO, in which a 5-2 team defeated a 6-1 team by a final score of 95-75 to win the tournament.

The most common denunciation of the Canadian Finals Format argues that a single game is double-counted, and is therefore bad for the same reason that head-to-head tiebreakers are bad; equivalently, once the two best teams are found, all games except for the game(s) between those two teams are arbitrarily thrown out. One of the more colorful criticisms in this vein showed that, in the VETO X example, "1 + 1 < 1".

Dwight Wynne noted the paradox inherent in awarding the finals advantage to the team with the head-to-head advantage, even if it had a worse record, in this post, citing the following example:

“	Suppose that the following happens: Maryland beats Brown, Stanford, loses to Chicago. Chicago beats Maryland, loses to Brown and Stanford. Brown and Stanford both beat Chicago but lose to several other non-contending teams such that both have 4+ losses. ...Claiming that Chicago is superior to Maryland involves: Chicago is better than every team in the field save Brown and Stanford by virtue of beating them; since Maryland is among those teams which Chicago is better than, Chicago is superior to Maryland. ...However, [that claim] purposefully ignores that by its own logic Chicago is not better than Brown or Stanford, and therefore since either Brown or Stanford can claim to be better than the "best team in the tournament", clearly one of those teams is the best team in the tournament (though we know this is not the case since Maryland is better than both of those teams).	„

Andrew Watkins joined in the discussion by noting that this finals system could hypothetically award an advantage to a team that had lost once each to the two worst teams in the tournament, while a team which lost only to the second-best team by record would have no advantage. Therefore, the system rewarded good play against good teams but did not penalize poor play against less-good teams.