Hey Vince, I got this question from a local and think it's a good one for others to know
We know the scoring for Group Match Play is 7,5,3,1 but what is the setting for player pairing (balanced, Swiss, random)? Thanks in advance
Hi Eric,
ANSWER: Both events are set to Balanced pairing.
However, since you asked, I'll share my thoughts on the paring options for this setting for anyone interested:Random is in my experience a bad setting for player pairing, player order, as well as arenas because you can literally end up being on the same game or with the same players or end up playing in a particular position an inordinate number of times. I remember playing a 3-strike and all 3 strikes out of 4 games played came from the same machine. Yeah, PLAY BETTER lol but I think most players prefer to play a variety of games and opponents (unless the one game is the most favorite :-) )
The Swiss vs Balanced Player Pairing DebateThis is a bit of a hot button topic debated among TDs and players and really could / should be its own thread / discussion. I've actually put time into analyzing the data between these 2 settings in MatchPlay where I was trying to see if one setting vs the other, resulted in players you don't normally see making the finals. In other words, I was looking to see which setting/format gives players who are not "the usual suspects" making it into a finals (especially when the finals is only a 4-player finals vs 8 or 16 as with more players it's obviously easier to sneak in but less so with fewer players). I'm always thrilled to see someone who hasn't made a finals before or win a tournament do so for the first time. For example, this past Sunday at Silverball, the player (Sean) won and it was his first tournament win.
The argument for Swiss is that you supposedly play others of the same skill level but that's not actually what happens, it's simply that you play players of essentially the same standings as you in that particular tournament for the next round. This may or may not represent players of similar skill level. The argument against swiss is when you have less experienced/skilled players who have a nice string of wins end up percolating up the standings only to play with some "sharks" at the top and then you get beat down, and then maybe you climb back up but only to get beat down again, etc. This is a little bit of simplification but essentially what happens in reality based on my observations in playing probably 100 Swiss format events. Perhaps there's other rationale for choosing Swiss which I'd be curious to hear but for events I am TD, I want to see different players at the podium vs the same ones every time.
With Balanced pairing, players tend to play a lot more different players than Swiss, and I have found it to be great for leagues and more casual tournaments just in terms of people meeting each other vs playing mainly with a smaller subset who are all "in their orbit" throughout the event which tends to occur with Swiss. While I'm mainly comparing Swiss with Balanced, it should be noted that Tiered Swiss, which is not used hardly at all in Florida but that format in some ways is a hybrid between standard swiss and balanced and many top players feel it is more "fair" (this was stated many times in the IFPA17 pre-tournaments and I think at least one of those events switched formats to tiered based on their requests).
When I originally looked at Swiss vs Balanced player pairing Florida tournaments in 2023, approx. 60% of tournaments in Florida were Swiss and 40% balanced. Currently, this year, because there are a lot of events in Tampa and South Florida now, and most, if not all of those are set to Balanced Pairing (as well as some in Jax), I estimate this has flip-flopped and the majority of tournaments today in the state are set to Balanced to the tune of 70% Balanced to 30% Swiss with TPL pretty much exclusively using Swiss.
Due to how long it would take to really analyze the tournament data, I did not reach a firm conclusion on whether Swiss or Balanced results in more variation of players ending up making a top-4 finals but Balanced did appear slightly more likely to result in a different mix of top-4 finalists than Swiss format events and even more so when you go to top 8 or 16. This is worthy of further analysis in my opinion but my original conclusion was there wasn't a significant difference, at least not when looking at top-4 finalists from qualifying regardless of either of these 2 player pairing settings. Frankly, I actually thought Balanced would result in more variation but the preliminary review I did was not in alignment with that hypothesis except the farther you move the cut-line down where it appears to provide more opportunity than Swiss. Ultimately, it may just come down to TD preference or player feedback or whether you want your event to be more social in terms of participants playing a bigger variety of players vs a potentially smaller group. I'm still curious to understand TD and Player thoughts on one format vs another as I have been toying with the idea of switching it up every once in awhile.
That all said, as mentioned in my one-line answer, the EM event is set to Balanced Pairing.
v
