Tournament module 2020 UPDATES: Swiss system v2

[Mathew5000]

It's the old way of elo.
Before you was starting at 1500, and you could gain or lose elo.

All elos were decreased by 1300.

Now, you start at 0 and can't lose elo below 100.

Thank you, Romain672!

I would never have guessed that was the explanation.

It's a bit weird, there must be some process inside the BGA server that still calculates Elo the old way, and the tournament listings (for Swiss System tournaments) are getting information from that old system, instead of the way every other part of BGA calculates Elo. Somebody should file a bug report.

[DerIKM]

We have, though, run into another case where the pairings don't seem to make sense. We just started a Small Islands tournament with 11 players, set for 4 player games. Instead of the tables being 4p/4p/3p, we instead got 4p/3p/2p/2p. This is for round 1, so previous pairings aren't an issue.
Tournament link: https://boardgamearena.com/tournament?id=67984

I guess it prefers 4-3-2-2 over 4-4-3 in order to have 4 winners which lets it create a 4p winner's table.
Im actually happy to read that the system seems to plan a little bit ahead. Otoh it also makes it a lot harder to predict/understand what it does

[BananaHarambe]

I'm really hoping for a new tournament update that allows organizers to create a single group Swiss tournament with a top cut for finals, typically single elimination finals. This is a very common system for tournaments in games with a luck & skill combination such as Magic: the Gathering, Pokemon TCG and other TCGs.

This could be fixed by allowing players to make only 1 group in the group stage tournaments, very simple in concept but no idea how much work it is to implement. Ideally this would create the tournament updates all in one place like the existing tournaments like this Swiss tournament: https://boardgamearena.com/tournament?id=332479

So it would display game results updates as they happen. The Stage 2 single elimination results would be in a table underneath Stage 1 with updates also showing up in the latest results.

I have a workaround I'm using for an ongoing tournament, which is to create 2 groups for Swiss here: https://boardgamearena.com/tournament?id=335519

There is a bit of awkwardness in having to split into 2 groups which avoids certain pairings with a Swiss, making higher round numbers for the initial Swiss not make a lot of sense since half of the potential opponents are not available. The number of rounds and people to qualify has to also be chosen differently than a simple 1 group Swiss. There's also the awkwardness of the results being split up into the 2 groups with no latest result updates from group stage tournaments, making it hard to track as an organizer. I want to see all the results from each round so I know the number of timeouts so I have easy feedback on the speed settings.

An alternative to the group stage adjustment would be to make the adjustment to Swiss tournaments directly. To do this, the tournament creator would be given a yes/no option for a single elimination finals and the option to choose either the number of players that qualify for finals or choose a specific score required to advance. (For example 5 wins in 7 games for a 2 player Swiss or Top 8 players).

[Meeplelowda]

This post I'm quoting is from 2021, but it still raises a good point. I can't figure out the "Opponents' average" column. For instance: I'm in a tournament, format swiss system, where only 1 game has been played. Screencap: https://snipboard.io/eZuE4q.jpg Of the three of us who played that first game, our Elos are 304, 205, and 356. So for each of these players, their "opponents' average" is 280.5, 330, and 254.5 respectively. But the tournament page (as shown in the screencap I linked to) says 1861, 1960, and 1809. That's an order of magnitude too high. The number given as "opponents' average" is not the mean average, it's not the sum; I don't know what it is. This isn't a glitch in just one tournament either, I've noticed this before. What is the explanation?

It's the old way of elo.
Before you was starting at 1500, and you could gain or lose elo.

All elos were decreased by 1300.

Now, you start at 0 and can't lose elo below 100.

It seems like this discussion is in need of an update. If you look at a recently completed Swiss tournament, the second tie breaker column is not displayed in the old Elo format (there are no four-digit Elos). [That is also a Kingdomino tournament like the 2021 tournament discussed above, to make the comparison as equivalent as possible.] Unfortunately there aren't a ton of Kingdomino Swiss tournaments, so we can't nail down the transition precisely, but some time between April 2024 and January 2025, at least Kingdomino switched the display of the second tie breaker to the new Elo format. Whenever it happened, it's not reflected in the BGA Release summaries.

In theory, there's no reason one system would be used for Kingdomino and another for other games, but here is a Kingdom Builder tournament started in May 2023 and finished in June 2023 that used (or at least displayed) the new Elo for the tie breaker.

Mathew5000 proposed an explanation for these discrepancies in another thread: "old" Elo is used for multiplayer Swiss tournaments (even to this day) and "modern" Elo is used for two-player Swiss tournaments (and has been since at least as early as 2023).