Merging Knockout and Round-Robin Tournaments: A Flexible Linear Elimination Tournament Design

TL;DR

This paper introduces a flexible tournament design that combines knockout and round-robin formats, allowing for linear participant elimination and adaptability to various numbers of players and matches.

Contribution

It proposes a novel tournament structure that integrates knockout and round-robin methods with linear elimination and broad adaptability.

Findings

Supports any number of players and matches

Maintains desirable properties for winner selection

Can be adapted for full player ranking

Abstract

We propose a new tournament structure that combines the popular knockout tournaments and the round-robin tournaments. As opposed to the extremes of divisive elimination and no elimination, our tournament aims to eliminate the participants as linearly as possible as a form of subtractive elimination. Our design is flexible in the sense that it can be adapted to any number of players $N$ and any number of matches $M$. Our design satisfies many properties that are desirable for a tournament to select a winner and can be adapted to rank all the participating players.