Talk:Tournament structure

Fractional round robin

This seems like a special case of the bit about rebracketing. Perhaps the latter needs to be fleshed out, but the new section seems redundant with at least the basic ideas of the rebracketing section. Jonah (talk) 10:03, 16 December 2017 (CST)

The fractional round robin is similar, but there are important distinctions. For example, in a fractional round robin, all games should be used in computing the final record (because teams to be compared will have played the same opponents), including games against opponents from a different playoff pool. In contrast, teams in a pooled round robin are ranked based only on the games against teams in the same pool (either playoff games or carryover preliminary games). Also, the formats are used for different purposes: a fractional round robin is used when the field is too small for a single round robin, but a pooled round robin is used when the field is too large for a single round robin. Thanks, Gregory Gauthier (talk) 10:12, 16 December 2017 (CST)

Not everyone has the same opinion about how to rank teams as you do; in particular, NAQT does not follow the ranking procedure you described. Your claim that "A fractional round robin format has a first phase where each team plays a single (or higher-order) round robin" belies the claim that fractional round robins are too small for single round robins — they do a single round robin as part of the fractional round robin, so it's obviously big enough to do that. (There's no such thing as too small to do a single round robin, other than, I guess, a field size of one team.) Jonah (talk) 10:14, 16 December 2017 (CST)

Please correct the information about rankings to reflect differences of opinion (I've seen it done the way I describe with all games carrying over, and I think there should be a consensus described on QBWiki for tournament directors to refer to). Perhaps I could have more clearly stated it, but the fractional round robin is an additional building block on top of a single (or rarely, higher-order) round robin. What I mean by a field too small to do a single round robin is that a single round robin has too few rounds to be satisfactory. Gregory Gauthier (talk) 10:20, 16 December 2017 (CST)