Super Metroid Winter 2018 OMW

SUPER METROID WINTER TOURNAMENT 2018 - PAIRINGS AND TIEBREAKERS

The tournament will be run according to a Swiss pairing system. Tiebreakers will be determined using opponent match win %. Those of you who have played in any Magic: The Gathering tournament should be familiar with the format.

The first round will be paired based on your SRL rank. Rather than pairing top players with bottom players, the seeding list will be split into two (ie: if there are 64 players ranked 1-64, it will be split into 1-32 and 33-64). Then players from the first list will be matched with players from the second (ie: in our two lists of 32 players before, player 1 will be matched with player 33, player 2 with player 34, etc). This is known as the 'Dutch System'.

Subsequent rounds will be paired based on the number of matches you've won or lost. Players should only be matched with those with the same number of match wins as them. That means for example, in the third round, a player with 2 match wins can only be matched with other players with 2 match wins. If there are not an even number of players to match with each other in the bracket (ie: in the third round if there are 11 players with 2 match wins), then one player from each bracket will be 'paired down' or 'paired up'. Ideally, that should match you with players of equivalent skill level.

By the end of the swiss rounds, we should have a clear idea of who the top players are. There will be a handful of players who have won most of their matches. For example, in a 80 player tournament, there may be 2 players who have won 6 rounds, 5 players who have won 5, and 14 players who have won 4. Following this, we will cut to the top 8 or top 16 of these players and proceed with a series of single elimination rounds. It becomes clear if we want 8 players that we take the best 8. In this case, it would be the 2 who have won 6, the 5 who have won 5, and the 'best' player out of those who won 4. This is determined through the player's 'opponent match win percentage'.

A player's match win percentage is calculated by taking the number of rounds they have won divided by the number of rounds played. For example, a player who has won 4 of 5 rounds will have a win percentage of 80%. A player's 'opponent match win percentage' (OMW) is the average of the match win percentage of each of his or her opponents with two important caveats - byes don't count towards this number, and any match win percentage less than 33% is taken as 33% (so as to prevent players who have had opponents drop from the tournament ruin their OMW).

For example, a player who went 5-1, losing in round 3 in a six round event played against players who went 0-2 (and subsequently dropped), 4-2, 3-3, 4-2, 3-3, and 4-2 would have an OMW of ( 0.33 + 0.66 + 0.5 + 0.66 + 0.5 + 0.66 ) / 6, giving us an OMW% of 55.17%. Having a higher OMW% implies that the players you were paired against were more skilled than that of other players, meaning it was harder to win. Therefore, whomever has a higher OMW% will be considered the higher ranked player in the bracket.

In the extremely unlikely event that two players are tied for OMW%, there will be a tiebreaker match held to determine the higher ranking.