EFFICACY OF TRADITIONAL SPORT TOURNAMENT STRUCTURES

The ranking abilities of some traditional sport tournaments under a va riety of initial conditions were analyzed using Monte Carlo procedures . A range of outcome measures were used since a tournament's efficacy will likely depend upon both its objectives and the playing abilities of its contestants. The traditional knockout (KO) is a weak tournament in its ability to rank all players although it requires fewer games t han the round robin (RR). The KO tournament's effifacy is notably enha nced, however, in some cases beyond that of the RR tournament if doubl e elimination procedures are used and the seeding is reasonably accura te. Under these conditions, we consider the KO structure to be the bes t available structure for most tournament purposes. A secondary recomm endation of this study is that the fourth and fifth placings be revers ed in the traditional KO structures for ranking all players in the eig ht player situation.