Playing the same opponent 6 consecutive times

[Godsmurf]

I'm in this tiny Lost Cities tournament that only had 4 signups. No problem, but I'd expect to play the other 3 participants about the same number of times (it uses the Swiss system). Instead I'm currently playing the same opponent for the 6th consecutive time, and of course the same is happening to the other two participants. Should I report this as a bug?

https://boardgamearena.com/10/lostcitie ... =655476000

[Meeplelowda]

I'm in this tiny Lost Cities tournament that only had 4 signups. No problem, but I'd expect to play the other 3 participants about the same number of times (it uses the Swiss system). Instead I'm currently playing the same opponent for the 6th consecutive time, and of course the same is happening to the other two participants. Should I report this as a bug?

https://boardgamearena.com/10/lostcitie ... =655476000

There is a known bug where this happens when the number of rounds in a Swiss tournament exceeds the total number of opponents someone could possibly face. I thought it only happened in multi-player games, but apparently it happens in two-player games as well.

It appears that the host for this tournament really doesn't understand the purpose of a Swiss system and the relationship between the number of rounds and the number of participants. A 10-round Swiss tournament like this would produce an unambiguous winner, i.e., an undefeated player assuming no ties are possible, even if there were 1024 participants. Your tournament only had 4 participants. You had an undefeated player after 2 rounds. There were grossly more rounds in this tournament than were needed to produce an unambiguous winner.

[BananaHarambe]

I'm in this tiny Lost Cities tournament that only had 4 signups. No problem, but I'd expect to play the other 3 participants about the same number of times (it uses the Swiss system). Instead I'm currently playing the same opponent for the 6th consecutive time, and of course the same is happening to the other two participants. Should I report this as a bug?

https://boardgamearena.com/10/lostcitie ... =655476000

Like Meeple said, that was a very poorly organized tournament with broken settings. A 10 round 2p Swiss with "try to prevent" pairing should have at least 20 players for that pairing system to make any sense. There fore they should have used different settings if intending a 4 person tournament or put a 20 player minimum on the tournament to avoid starting a poor tournament.

From reading BGA forums I've learned that the old Swiss tournament mode had better functionality in a few ways, like better "duplicate pairing handling" for small tournaments like this, but it only allowed 2 player games.

Swiss tournament software for 2 player games is common with existing code and algorithms to copy for BGA. When they made the new Swiss tournament mode (removing v1) it now allows for any number of players per table, which is MUCH more complicated to code a pairing algorithm for. However, enough BGA players urged them to add 3+ player Swiss so I imagine they did the best they could, but some compromises needed to be made.

The code is simple, it tries to create pairings, realizes that all pairings are "bad", then pairs whatever the defaul/"first try" pairing in order and gets what you see in your tournament. My guess is that the dupliucate check is a true/false for "have you played this played yet?" so the code has no issue pairing you over and over.

There's a warning in tournament creation not to use "try to prevent" for small tournaments for this reason. However BGA doesn't provide any further checks or warnings and hasn't fixed the bug.

Just use the Don't try to prevent pairings for small player counts.

[Mathew5000]

Should I report this as a bug?

Please upvote this existing bug report: https://boardgamearena.com/bug?id=56504

If you want to read further, there have been several threads about Swiss tournaments over the last few months (and before that) in the tournaments forum.

Here's a thread from 2023 where I linked to other bug reports concerning Swiss tournaments: https://boardgamearena.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=30689