Pokémon TCG: Sword and Shield—Brilliant Stars

National Championship structure

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Michel

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From PUI's website :

The National Championships will be broken into sections by age groups and will be run using Swiss Pairings. Because Swiss rounds are dependent upon total attendance of each age group, there will be a minimum of five rounds of Swiss, with more rounds as necessary based on attendance. Swiss rounds will feature one-game matches.

After the final round of Swiss, the top 16 players from each age group (attendance levels permitting) will move into a single-elimination round. The single-elimination rounds will feature best-of-three game matches
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I don't know if I didn't see that earlier, or if it has been changed, but I don't understand why one-game matches has been chosen for the swiss rounds.

IMO, it adds a lot of luck to the game that is not needed.

Who has, in best of 3, never lost the first game because of a bad opening hand but won the two other matches because the opponent was weaker ?

Tournaments in general, and especially National championships which are the highest level of tournaments except Worlds, have as objective, according to the Floor rules, to determine the skill level of each player.
Introducing luck through single matches goes against that idea and against the first words of the Floor rules and 'Spirit of the game' : the Pokemon TCG is a game of skill.
 
in my country ,we have started the 1-game matches since a few tournaments ago.

1st it sucks,u lose miserably for nothing
2nd,although it saves time for the TOs,but the players will have lesser fun in the tournament

and wats more,my local shop gonna have unlimited tournament soon ,its a 1 game matches,how about having 4 erika jigglypuff doing 1 turn KO?
 
I dunno why they doing that, you know I have had and seen those 1 game matches be alot of luck now, I had 1 game matches back in the day end in turn one because of a simple machop vs voltorb and mainly because one of the players would draw maybe 1 basic pokemon and whatnot, but just maybe with all the supporter and thinner cards thats present in the game, maybe the luck factor wont just totally own everything too much.
 
The single games in swiss are only unfair to a large pool of players if only 2 or 4 of the players are sent into the elimation rounds. A larger pool of players who pass to the elimination helps to balance out those 1 turn loss matches which happen to everyone.

At World's my daughter went 4-2-1 (she IDed the last match). 1 of her losses took less than 2 minutes when she had a bad draw. She finished 22nd overall in the Swiss matches if I remember correctly. The top 32 went on to play elimination matches and she made it to the semifinals. Her record in swiss was not stellar, but she had enough skill to manage to win the majority of her matches.

This is a good illustration of how a larger pool of players should be taken into the final rounds. Even the best players have bad luck, but overall skillnad deck construction will still shine thru the occasional bad luck.

Clay M
 
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I never understood why the finals in tournaments become best out of three games when all the rounds before them were single game matches. Why is it that in the finals you get a chance to recover from a bad draw but the rounds before if a player got a bad hand and lost there was nothing they could do but take that loss and move on. They should either change all rounds to best out of three or make them all single game matches to make it complettely fair.
 
Find better ways not to have bad hands. I rarely have any bad hands with my zapdos deck.
 
Well, this is sorta messed up... but i do see a reason why they might want to have the three-match rounds during single eliminations... By the time single eliminations start up at the end of the tournament, they're gonna want to be sure that all those who have that chance of winning get a fair chance TO come out on top. In other words, they want to try to eliminate the possibility that they lost in single elimination rounds BECAUSE of that bad opening hand, or whatever... That's just my idea of why they might possibly be setting it up this way from now on...

On the other hand though, it seems just a little screwy that we're not goin' to have three-match rounds, but i'm not gonna complain if they want to change it in that way...
 
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Poke_Dad gives a perfectly good example of how this type of tournament works without being unfair and allowing for bad luck too.

approx 3hours of swiss followed by 4 hours of knock out makes for an 8 or 9 hour day. That is long enough IMHO.
 
This is pretty standard stuff. I don't think I've ever been to an event that has required best of three play in swiss. It would be a huge undertaking and added time to make Nationals players use best out of three during the swiss rounds. There will be at least seven rounds at US Nationals, so with best two out of three that would be seven hours, not even counting the single elimination rounds or the breaks needed.
 
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Invader-ZIM said:
By the time single eliminations start up at the end of the tournament, they're gonna want to be sure that all those who have that chance of winning get a fair chance TO come out on top.
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Who's to say that someone that lost round 1 because of a horrible hand couldn't have won the tournament overall but wasn't able to make it because of the effect that kind of loss has on his tie-breaker.
 
because with a top 16 cut and five rounds of swiss you need 257 players before you have to resort to tie breakers. Or maybe its 513 but regardless either figure is probably more players in any particular age group than we are likely to see at ANY international Nationals.
 
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Well I see both arguments to this and my thing is that since pokemon is a game of skill isnt it skill to comeback from a bad starting hand? Let's face it there is no game where you are guaranteed a good starting hand to make things fair. IMO the single match for swiss is ok to me and the T16 with best of 3 is good because this is when you want to figure out if the person is really good or not.

JMHO
~Tormented~
 
GymLeaderPhil said:
This is pretty standard stuff. I don't think I've ever been to an event that has required best of three play in swiss. It would be a huge undertaking and added time to make Nationals players use best out of three during the swiss rounds.
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So you're saying that Nationals might run really long if we played best of 3 in swiss rounds?

Glad that didn't happen last year. :eek:
 
Dragonstar said:
I never understood why the finals in tournaments become best out of three games when all the rounds before them were single game matches. Why is it that in the finals you get a chance to recover from a bad draw but the rounds before if a player got a bad hand and lost there was nothing they could do but take that loss and move on. They should either change all rounds to best out of three or make them all single game matches to make it complettely fair.
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Very insightful post Dragonstar. I think that it should be best 2 out of 3 for all matches even in swiss. However, tournaments are long ordeals so this could never happen. But I disagree with not making the cut 2 out of 3. Some's better than none Dragonstar
 
The difference is that the elimination rounds are just that...lose and you are done. Your day is not determined in single game swiss by 1 match, but the your total record thru the rounds. If you have bad luck in all your games, then maybe you had a badly constructed deck to begin with. 1 bad round is the norm for most. Every deck craps out on you sometimes, even the very best. If you win in Swiss you keep playing good players. 1 loss doesn't mean you are done contrary to what is perceived by many.

Part of the reason people have this misperception is the use of the TMS tournament program, which has many flaws. It really is possible to run a large tournament without a computer...we do it in Memphis and St Louis every time and finish on schedule....but I digress.

If the tournament is run correctly, with the proper number of rounds of swiss, single games is truly not a problem...and believe me, when I 1st came to pokemon after playing MtG from the beginning, I had a lot of trouble with the idea of single game tournament matches. But in truth, the best players still are the ones who rise to the top no matter if its a single or best 2 of 3 format.
 
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best-of-3 has the highest probability of producing the best players/decks. However, 1-game matches allow top players who have a bad matchup (ie., facing their weakness) to possibly win regardless. For example, if two fairly evenly matched players face each other, but one player's deck is weak against the other, chances are, the weak deck will lose. Best-of-3 only increases that probability. In this example, a 1-game match gives the weak-deck player a better chance to win (ie., capitalize on mistakes, early 1-poke KO).

I prefer best-of-3 and still consider it the best option for swiss rounds at high level events like Nationals. We're considering it for our CO States, since most of our CO local tournaments are best-of-3 (although we don't have playoffs at our local tournaments).

So, best-of-3, even in the swiss rounds, accomplishes 2 main objectives:

1. The best players are more likely to win.
2. The meta-game becomes much more important.

Therefore, the best players who meta-game well will rise to the top in best-of-3. 1-games matches decrease that probability. Not a good thing, IMO, for major events like States and higher. JMO.
 
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There isn't anything surprizing about the chosen structure for this event. I believe last year was the same.
 
Bad draws, and a resulting loss can happen to the best players. However, in Swiss play, one loss will not necessary eliminate you from the finals, and with a top 16, players with two losses may get even get in. Finals are a different story, lose and you are out. When weighing those facts against the time it takes for match play, I feel the best way to play is single games in Swiss and Match play in the Finals.

BDS
 
Bad draws are a part of play, a better player and deck will have less or this and/or will make better use of it.

Unless you're like a player I know who didn't shuffle after the Judges deck checked him, and all four of his main Pokemon were in his prizes (lanturns).
 
I'm really interested in finding out exactly how the Pod thing that I've heard they use in Japan works. The more I think about it, the more I think like it. Especially if once you have completed a game you can just record your win/loss and move on to the next game as soon as another game has finished. I think that this may free up enough time that we can eliminate time limits and get back to playing this game the way that it was designed to be played! Maybe set a time limit for the whole Swiss portion. Then you'd have to decide what to do with those who still have games left to be played, but I'm sure some way could be worked out to penalize those who play extremely slow with out penalizing his/her un-played opponents.
 
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