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A single-elimination, knockout, or sudden death tournament is a type of
elimination tournament A tournament is a competition involving at least three competitors, all participating in a sport or game. More specifically, the term may be used in either of two overlapping senses: # One or more competitions held at a single venue and concentr ...
where the loser of each match-up is immediately eliminated from the tournament. Each winner will play another in the next round, until the final match-up, whose winner becomes the tournament champion. Each match-up may be a single match or several, for example
two-legged tie In sports (particularly association football), a two-legged tie is a contest between two teams which comprises two matches or "legs", with each team as the home team in one leg. The winning team is usually determined by aggregate score, the sum ...
s in European sports or
best-of series There are a number of formats used in various levels of competition in sports and games to determine an overall champion. Some of the most common are the ''single elimination'', the ''best-of-'' series, the ''total points series'' more commonly kn ...
in American pro sports. Defeated competitors may play no further part after losing, or may participate in "consolation" or "classification" matches against other losers to determine the lower final rankings; for example, a
third place playoff A third place match, game for third place, bronze medal game or consolation game is a single match that is included in many sporting knockout tournaments to decide which competitor or team will be credited with finishing third and fourth. The tea ...
between losing semi-finalists. In a shootout
poker tournament A poker tournament is a tournament where players compete by playing poker. It can feature as few as two players playing on a single table (called a " heads-up" tournament), and as many as tens of thousands of players playing on thousands of ta ...
, there are more than two players competing at each table, and sometimes more than one progressing to the next round. Some competitions are held with a pure single-elimination tournament system. Others have many phases, with the last being a single-elimination final stage, often called
playoffs The playoffs, play-offs, postseason or finals of a sports league are a competition played after the regular season by the top competitors to determine the league champion or a similar accolade. Depending on the league, the playoffs may be eithe ...
.


Nomenclature

In
English English usually refers to: * English language * English people English may also refer to: Peoples, culture, and language * ''English'', an adjective for something of, from, or related to England ** English national ide ...
, the round in which only eight competitors remain is generally called (with or without hyphenation) the ''quarter-final'' round; this is followed by the ''semi-final'' round, in which only four are left, the two winners of which then meet in the ''final'' or ''championship round''. The round before the quarterfinals has multiple designations. Often it is called the ''round of sixteen'', ''last sixteen'', or (in South Asia) ''pre-quarterfinals''. In many other languages the term for these eight matches translates to ''eighth-final'' (e.g., in these eight European languages: "huitième de finale" in French, ''octavos de final'' in
Spanish Spanish might refer to: * Items from or related to Spain: **Spaniards are a nation and ethnic group indigenous to Spain **Spanish language, spoken in Spain and many Latin American countries **Spanish cuisine Other places * Spanish, Ontario, Can ...
, ''Achtelfinale'' in
German German(s) may refer to: * Germany (of or related to) ** Germania (historical use) * Germans, citizens of Germany, people of German ancestry, or native speakers of the German language ** For citizens of Germany, see also German nationality law **Ge ...
, ''ottavi di finale'' in
Italian Italian(s) may refer to: * Anything of, from, or related to the people of Italy over the centuries ** Italians, an ethnic group or simply a citizen of the Italian Republic or Italian Kingdom ** Italian language, a Romance language *** Regional Ita ...
, ''oitavos-de-final'' in
Portuguese Portuguese may refer to: * anything of, from, or related to the country and nation of Portugal ** Portuguese cuisine, traditional foods ** Portuguese language, a Romance language *** Portuguese dialects, variants of the Portuguese language ** Portu ...
, ''osmifinále'' in
Czech Czech may refer to: * Anything from or related to the Czech Republic, a country in Europe ** Czech language ** Czechs, the people of the area ** Czech culture ** Czech cuisine * One of three mythical brothers, Lech, Czech, and Rus' Places * Czech, ...
, ''osemfinále'' in Slovak, and ''osmina finala'' in Serbian), though this term is rare in English itself. The round before the round of sixteen is sometimes called ''round of thirty-two'' in English. Terms for this in other languages generally translate as "sixteenth final". Earlier rounds are typically numbered counting forwards from the first round, or by the number of remaining competitors. If some competitors get a bye, the round at which they enter may be named the ''first round'', with the earlier matches called a ''preliminary round'', ''qualifying round'', ''opening round'', or the ''play-in games''. Examples of the diverse names given to concurrent rounds in various select disciplines: Notes:


Example

The final three rounds of the 2002–03 UEFA Champions League tournament:


Quarter-finals


Semi-finals

*Both clubs played their home leg in the same stadium (the
San Siro Stadio Giuseppe Meazza, commonly known as San Siro, is a football stadium in the San Siro district of Milan, Italy, which is the home of A.C. Milan and Inter Milan. It has a seating capacity of 80,018, making it one of the largest stadiums i ...
), but Milan were the designated away side in the second leg, and thus won on away goals.


Final


Classification

Without any additional matches, the only position a single-elimination tournament can reliably determine is first - for example, if sorting the numbers 1-4 ascending, if 4 and 3 meet in the first round, 3 and 1 will lose in the first round and 2 will lose in the second, selecting 4 as the largest number in the set, but insufficient comparisons have been performed to determine which is greater, 2 or 3. Despite this, the candidate that loses in the final round is commonly considered to have taken second place (in this case, 2). When matches are held to determine places or prizes lower than first and second, these typically include a match between the losers of the semifinal matches called
third place playoff A third place match, game for third place, bronze medal game or consolation game is a single match that is included in many sporting knockout tournaments to decide which competitor or team will be credited with finishing third and fourth. The tea ...
s, the winner therein placing third and the loser fourth. Many Olympic single-elimination tournaments feature the bronze medal match if they do not award bronze medals to both losing semifinalists. The
FIFA World Cup The FIFA World Cup, often simply called the World Cup, is an international association football competition contested by the senior men's national teams of the members of the ' ( FIFA), the sport's global governing body. The tournament ha ...
has long featured the third place match (since 1934), though the
UEFA Euro The UEFA European Football Championship, less formally the European Championship and informally the Euro, is the primary association football tournament organised by the Union of European Football Associations (UEFA). The competition is contes ...
has not held one since the 1980 edition. Sometimes, contests are also held among the losers of the quarterfinal matches to determine fifth to eighth places – this is most commonly encountered in the
Olympic Games The modern Olympic Games or Olympics (french: link=no, Jeux olympiques) are the leading international sporting events featuring summer and winter sports competitions in which thousands of athletes from around the world participate in a var ...
, with the exception of
boxing Boxing (also known as "Western boxing" or "pugilism") is a combat sport in which two people, usually wearing protective gloves and other protective equipment such as hand wraps and mouthguards, throw punches at each other for a predetermine ...
, where both fighters are deemed to be third place. In one scenario, two "consolation semifinal" matches may be conducted, with the winners of these then facing off to determine fifth and sixth places and the losers playing for seventh and eighth; those are used often in qualifying tournaments where only the top five teams advance to the next round; or some method of ranking the four quarterfinal losers might be employed, in which case only one round of additional matches would be held among them, the two highest-ranked therein then playing for fifth and sixth places and the two lowest for seventh and eighth. The number of distinct ways of arranging a single-elimination tournament (as an abstract structure, prior to seeding the players into the tournament) is given by the
Wedderburn–Etherington number The Wedderburn–Etherington numbers are an integer sequence named for Ivor Malcolm Haddon Etherington.. and Joseph Wedderburn. that can be used to count certain kinds of binary trees. The first few numbers in the sequence are :0, 1, 1, 1, 2, 3, 6, ...
s. Thus, for instance, there are three different arrangements for five players: * The players may be divided into brackets of two and three players, the winners of which meet in the final game * The bottom four players may play a two-round tournament, the winner of which plays the top player * The bottom two players may meet, after which each subsequent game pairs the winner of the previous game with the next player However, the number of arrangements grows quickly for larger numbers of players and not all of them are commonly used.


Seeding

Opponents may be allocated randomly (such as in the FA Cup); however, since the "luck of the draw" may result in the highest-rated competitors being scheduled to face each other early in the competition, ''seeding'' is often used to prevent this. Brackets are set up so that the top two seeds could not possibly meet until the final round (should both advance that far), none of the top four can meet prior to the semifinals, and so on. If no seeding is used, the tournament is called a random knockout tournament. Standard seeding pairs the highest and lowest, then second highest and second lowest and so on, for an 8 seed tournament this is 1 v 8, 2 v 7, 3 v 6 and 4 v 5, for example this is used for 16 seeds in the
World Snooker Championship The World Snooker Championship is the longest-running and most prestigious tournament in professional snooker. It is also the wealthiest, with total prize money in 2022 of £2,395,000, including £500,000 for the winner. First held in 1927, it ...
and 32 seeds in the
World Darts Championship The World Professional Darts Championship is one of the most important tournaments in the darts calendar. Originally held as an annual event between 1978 and 1993, players then broke off into two separate organisations after a controversial split ...
. Some tournaments stray from this, for example is not the procedure that is followed in most tennis tournaments, where the 1 and 2 seeds are placed in separate brackets, but then the 3 and 4 seeds are assigned to their brackets randomly, and so too are seeds 5 through 8, and so on. This may result in some brackets consisting of stronger players than other brackets, and since only the top 32 players of 128 are seeded in Tennis Grand Slam tournaments, it is conceivable that the 33rd-best player in a 128-player field could end up playing the top seed in the first round. An example of this occurring was when World No. 33
Florian Mayer Florian Mayer (; born 5 October 1983) is a German former professional tennis player. Mayer reached his career-high singles ranking of world No. 18 in June 2011. Also in 2011, Mayer won his first ATP title after four previous defeats in ATP fin ...
was drawn against (and eventually defeated by) then-World No. 1
Novak Djokovic Novak Djokovic ( sr-Cyrl, Новак Ђоковић, translit=Novak Đoković, ; born 22 May 1987) is a Serbian professional tennis player. He has been ranked world No. 1 for a record total 373 weeks, and has finished as the year-end No. 1 ...
in the first round of the 2013 Wimbledon Championships, in what was also a rematch of a quarterfinal from the previous year.Wimbledon 2013: Men's matches to watch out for
''The Roar'', 22 June 2013 Sometimes the remaining competitors in a single-elimination tournament will be "re-seeded" so that the highest surviving seed is made to play the lowest surviving seed in the next round, the second-highest plays the second-lowest, etc. This may be done after each round, or only at selected intervals. In American team sports, for example, the NFL employs this tactic, but
MLS Major League Soccer (MLS) is a men's professional soccer league sanctioned by the United States Soccer Federation, which represents the sport's highest level in the United States. The league comprises 29 teams—26 in the U.S. and 3 in Canada ...
,
NHL The National Hockey League (NHL; french: Ligue nationale de hockey—LNH, ) is a professional ice hockey league in North America comprising 32 teams—25 in the United States and 7 in Canada. It is considered to be the top ranked professional ...
and the NBA do not (and neither does the NCAA college basketball tournament).
MLB Major League Baseball (MLB) is a professional baseball organization and the oldest major professional sports league in the world. MLB is composed of 30 total teams, divided equally between the National League (NL) and the American League (AL), ...
does not have enough teams (12) in its playoff tournament where re-seeding would make a large difference in the matchups; only the WNBA's at the minimum, which is at least four from each conference for a total of 8. The NBA's format calls for the winner of the first-round series between the first and eighth seeds (within each of the two conferences the league has) to face the winner of the first-round series between the fourth and fifth seeds in the next round, even if one or more of the top three seeds had been upset in their first-round series; critics have claimed that this gives a team fighting for the fifth and sixth seeding positions near the end of the regular season an incentive to
tank A tank is an armoured fighting vehicle intended as a primary offensive weapon in front-line ground combat. Tank designs are a balance of heavy firepower, strong armour, and good battlefield mobility provided by tracks and a powerful engi ...
(deliberately lose) games, so as to finish sixth and thus avoid a possible match-up with the top seed until one round later. MLS' format is identical, except that the top-seed gets a first-round bye to play 4th-5th seed winner. In some situations, a seeding restriction may be implemented; from 1975 until 1989 in the NFL, and from 1994 until 2011 in
MLB Major League Baseball (MLB) is a professional baseball organization and the oldest major professional sports league in the world. MLB is composed of 30 total teams, divided equally between the National League (NL) and the American League (AL), ...
there was a rule where at the conference or league semifinal, should the top seed and last seed (wild card) be from the same division, they cannot play each other; in that case, the top seed plays the worst division champion; the second-best division champion plays the wild card team. This is due to the scheduling employed for the regular season, in which a team faces any given divisional opponent more often than any given non-divisional opponent – the tournament favors match-ups that took place fewer times in the regular season (or did not take place, in some cases). In international
fencing Fencing is a group of three related combat sports. The three disciplines in modern fencing are the foil, the épée, and the sabre (also ''saber''); winning points are made through the weapon's contact with an opponent. A fourth discipline, ...
competitions, it is common to have a
group stage A tournament is a competition involving at least three competitors, all participating in a sport or game. More specifically, the term may be used in either of two overlapping senses: # One or more competitions held at a single venue and concen ...
. Participants are divided in groups of 6–7 fencers who play a round-robin tournament, and a ranking is calculated from the consolidated group results. Single elimination is seeded from this ranking.


Evaluation

The single-elimination format enables a relatively large number of competitors to participate. There are no "dead" matches (perhaps excluding "classification" matches), and no matches where one competitor has more to play for than the other. The format is less suited to games where draws are frequent. In
chess Chess is a board game for two players, called White and Black, each controlling an army of chess pieces in their color, with the objective to checkmate the opponent's king. It is sometimes called international chess or Western chess to dist ...
, each fixture in a single-elimination tournament must be played over multiple matches, because draws are common, and because white has an advantage over black. In
association football Association football, more commonly known as football or soccer, is a team sport played between two teams of 11 players who primarily use their feet to propel the ball around a rectangular field called a pitch. The objective of the game is ...
, games ending in a draw may be settled in extra time and eventually by a
penalty shootout The penalty shootout is a method of determining a winner in sports matches that would have otherwise been drawn or tied. The rules for penalty shootouts vary between sports and even different competitions; however, the usual form is similar to pe ...
or by replaying the fixture. Another perceived disadvantage is that most competitors are eliminated after relatively few games. Variations such as the
double-elimination tournament A double-elimination tournament is a type of elimination tournament competition in which a participant ceases to be eligible to win the tournament's championship upon having lost ''two'' games or matches. It stands in contrast to a single-elimina ...
allow competitors a single loss while remaining eligible for overall victory. However, losing one game requires the competitor to win more games in order to win the tournament. In a random knockout tournament (single-elimination without any seeding), awarding the second place to the loser of the final is unjustified: any of the competitors knocked out by the tournament winner might have been the second strongest one, but they never got the chance to play against the losing finalist. In general, it is only fair to use a single-elimination tournament to determine first place. To fairly determine lower places requires some form of round-robin in which each player/team gets the opportunity to face every other player/team. Also, if the competitors' performance is variable, that is, it depends on a small, varying factor in addition to the actual strength of the competitors, then not only will it become less likely that the strongest competitor actually wins the tournament, in addition the seeding done by the tournament organizers will play a major part in deciding the winner. As a random factor is always present in a real-world competition, this might easily cause accusations of unfairness.


Other tournament systems

Variations of the single-elimination tournament include: *
Double-elimination tournament A double-elimination tournament is a type of elimination tournament competition in which a participant ceases to be eligible to win the tournament's championship upon having lost ''two'' games or matches. It stands in contrast to a single-elimina ...
*
McIntyre System The McIntyre System, or systems as there have been five of them, is a playoff system that gives an advantage to teams or competitors qualifying higher. The systems were developed by Ken McIntyre, an Australian lawyer, historian and English lect ...
, a group of tournament formats that combine features of single- and double-elimination tournaments. Varieties of this system include: **
Page playoff system The Page playoff system is a playoff format used primarily in softball and curling at the championship level, the Indian Premier League and Pakistan Super League cricket tournaments. Teams are seeded using a round-robin tournament and the top f ...
(four teams) **
Top five play-offs A play-off structure involving the top five teams was used to determine the winners of the Super League competition in British rugby league from 1998 until 2001. A top six play-off system was then introduced. Apart from the Grand Final all matche ...
**
Top six play-offs After a top five play-off system was used, a play-off structure involving the top six teams was used to determine the winners of the Super League competition in British rugby league from 2002 through to 2008. Apart from the Grand Final, all mat ...
**
McIntyre Final Eight System The McIntyre Final Eight System was devised by Ken McIntyre in addition to the McIntyre Four, Five and Six systems. It is a playoff system of the top 8 finishers in a competition to determine which two teams will play in the grand final. The tea ...
** Super League play-offs, which formerly used a McIntyre Final Eight variant **
AFL final eight system The AFL final eight system is an eight-team championship playoff tournament developed and adopted by the Australian Football League in the 2000 season. The eight teams, which are ranked or seeded in advance of the tournament, participate in a fo ...
, another variant of the McIntyre Final Eight, currently used by the Australian Football League Other common tournament types include: * Round-robin tournament *
Swiss-system tournament A Swiss-system tournament is a non-eliminating tournament format that features a fixed number of rounds of competition, but considerably fewer than for a round-robin tournament; thus each competitor (team or individual) does not play all the other ...


References

{{Reflist Tournament systems ja:トーナメント方式#勝ち残り式トーナメント