I read through this entire thread last week trying to get ideas for the best way to structure our league's first heads up tournament. Here's a little post-mortem in case it helps anyone else.
We ended up having 12 players, and if i had known that from the start i might have done things a little differently, but I didn't have a confirmed 12th until about 1 hour before the event so I just used a generic double elimination tournament format using the following structure:
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All matches were only 1 game since it was double-elimination and all my players were fine with that.
I used a pre-generated 12 team double elimination bracket from here, using seeding based on league standings so far in the season (this was the 11 of 12 events in the season). These can be generated for any number of players. This is what the bracket looked like:
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Things started off great and the first games all finished at blind level 5 at the latest. However, as the losers bracket progressed a few games dragged out to around an hour (in some cases they "forgot" to raise the blinds, in others it was just a battle of nits). The result was that the winner of the winners bracket was waiting around for over 2 hours while the losers bracket sorted out who would face him.
Takeaways:
- I chose not to use the dealer table ante recommended by many because many of my players complain about things like that and they were already going to complain enough about having to deal every other hand, but next time I think I'll do it anyway. It would really help punish players who play too tight and just drag the game out forever.
- some of my players suggested starting at 50BB and skipping the first blind level since the first level didn't feel very meaningful, but i think the ante is a better solution to this.
- if an even number of players is available, i think a 2 or 3 round round robin of some sort followed by a single elimination playoff would have better achieved the goal of everyone playing enough games but no one waiting around too long for their next matches to start. Having to wait 2+ rounds to find out who your next opponent was was a killer for the double-elimination bracket.
- I'm also considering a format where you play 3 30 minute round robin games and your score at the end is your total chip count, which would guarantee that all games end at the same time and also create a way of creating a more stratified leaderboard as opposed to just everyone being 2-1 or something like that (since many games would not finish in the allotted 30 minutes and so some players would get partial credit so to speak), and then top 8 in the standings play single elimination playoffs in a seeded bracket. Again the drawback here is you need an even number of players to make it work but I really want to make this work next time.
Thanks to everyone for the ideas and hope this helps someone else.
Oh, and since it's PCF I went with starting stacks of 10/20/10 T500/T1000/T5000 for 75k total and that seemed to work pretty well, except for one table that grabbed 1 rack
each (I had prepared the 4 barrels in 1 rack for each table) instead of 1 rack per match lol. I knew something was wrong when I walked by and it looked like both players had doubled up.
