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Ultimate Frisbee Tournament 101: Choosing a format

Posted by christian on Thursday, February 26, 2009 · No comments

An integral part of any Frisbee tournament is its format and schedule. Teams are coming for the game (and maybe the party too), so you better give them what they want. This article is the first in a loose series on how to organise an Ultimate Frisbee tournament, trying to point out the most important aspects of a decent planning. There are quite some resources spread over the Web, most notably the UPA Manual of Championship Series Tournament Formats.

Be sure to know your goals before choosing a format. Does your tournament need to determine a single winner? Does your tournament function as a qualification that needs to promote or relegate teams?

Also be sure to know your constraints. These are normally the number of fields available, which heavily impacts the tournament format choice. Try to calculate the number of games that can be played, since this is usually guiding the choice. You can tweak the number of possible games by setting a time limit and by installing a point cap (be aware that the cap might mess up everything in case of huge comebacks).

The following paragraphs introduce four common formats for Ultimate Frisbee tournaments. It is important to note that most of the times a mixture of these formats are applied.

1. Round robin

A round-robin tournament or all-play-all tournament is a type of group tournament in which each participant plays every other participant an equal number of times.

A classic among Frisbee tournament formats. Any games played within a pool or group fall in this category. This is an excellent mean to prepare the next stage, for instance a single elimination that leads to the finals.

2. Single elimination

A single-elimination tournament, also called a knock-out, cup or sudden death tournament, is a type of elimination tournament where the loser of each match is immediately eliminated from winning the event. This kind of format is commonly applied after some kind of pool play, e.g. for quarterss, semis and finals.

3. Double elimination

A double-elimination tournament is broken into two sets of brackets, the Winner's Bracket and Loser's Bracket. After the first round, the winners proceed into the Winner's Bracket and the losers proceed into the Loser's Bracket. If you lose while in the Loser's Bracket you are eliminated.

I didn't encounter this format in Europe yet, but the Lei-Out successfully applies it for its second day (after an initial round robin / pool games).

4. Swiss system

The principle of a Swiss tournament is that each team will be pitted against another team that has done as well (or as poorly) as itself. This format relies on a sufficient number of fields so that all the matches can be played simultaneously. The first round is either drawn at random or seeded according an initial ranking.

The Windmill Windup in Amsterdam features this innovative format. Team gather Victory Points (VP) based on the point-difference of their games. Ranking all teams regarding their VPs leads to the next match ups: the first plays the second, the third plays the fourth and so on. Corrections are only made to avoid that teams meet twice in the competition. After six of these swiss rounds a single elimination round leads to the final.

Now you have a solid basis of Ultimate Frisbee tournament formats to choose from, let's assume that you picked one (or a combination of several) that suits you best. Now you can start to think about preparing a fair schedule. Consider the following general rules during scheduling:

  1. Every team should get an equal chance to win
  2. Each team should get a good number of games
  3. Teams should be somehow seeded regarding their level

PrintYourBrackets.com is a nice website that helps to actually get the schedule on paper.

There is certainly no perfect format, especially because they mostly rely on an initial seeding. Just don't try to reinvent the wheel, as always it's best to learn from others. Try to find a tournament of the same size and ambitions as yours and look how they solved it. Enjoy your tournament!

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