Tournament Seeding

Hey guys, so I am maybe, just maybe considering having a friendly tournament with my friends around where I live, and I was wondering how seeding works? Is it just picking names out of a hat, or what?

It depends on how you want to run it. For simplicity sake, I am assuming there are eight of you. You could randomly draw matches and then winners play winners (the 1st match winner plays the 2nd match winner etc). If you seeded everyone 1-8 the matches would go like this:

1v8
4v5
3v6
2v7

The reason is to create the fairest possible match-ups in the second assuming all top seeds win (1v4 and 2v3). Upsets happen though, so dont worry if a match is 4v8

There are plenty of sites out there to generate a double or even triple eliminaton (2 or 3 losses and you are out, people would have lost a game play each other in a losers bracket)

Yeah, I know how seeding generally works (being a big March Madness fan), what I was wondering is if their is an official way in our ruleset of determining who got which seed; i.e. who gets No. 1, who gets No. 2, etc.

the most reliable is to play a round-robin; that way you know how everyone stacks up against each other. unfortunately this usually results in way too many games considering that a round-robin between 8 people gives you 28 games.

more usually you'll have a general idea of who the best players are among your group even if you don't have an exact ranking. if you have that, you can do a few other things:

- pre-tourney seeding FFAs - as many as required. we only needed one for Kelowna 2012 between the top 4 players; you may want to do more, and do some among the lower ranked players as well, for more reliable seeding purposes.

- pools - organize players into as many groups or "pools" as required so that the top players are distributed evenly among pools. then, have each pool play a round robin amongst themselves and seed using the following results. we used this for Kelowna 2010.

- popular opinion or using the last tourney as your seeding information - just rank everyone manually and/or take it to friendlies if there are any disputes regarding ranking.

to answer your question, probably the most "official" among large groups of players is the pool system.