How to create Memoir 44 Tournaments

[Winn81]

While the Swiss system technically works, I really wouldn't recommend it. The tiebreaker is opponents points followed by opponents average ELO, neither of which is a very good tiebreaker.

[Cavetoad]

It does require more than three players, but that is normal for a tournament
Swiss works great for a memoir tournament, it is fully supported by BGA, so go ahead and use it!

Oh I meant per game, so that's just the 'group'. I gotcha. I"m going to have to read up on it, thanks!

[Cavetoad]

While the Swiss system technically works, I really wouldn't recommend it. The tiebreaker is opponents points followed by opponents average ELO, neither of which is a very good tiebreaker.

Oh! Yeah that doesn't seem like a good tiebreaker at all. Thanks!

[jeroenh]

While the Swiss system technically works, I really wouldn't recommend it. The tiebreaker is opponents points followed by opponents average ELO, neither of which is a very good tiebreaker.

Would you care to explain why that is not a good tiebreaker?

It would seem to me that if both players have the same amount of wins, then this seems like a reasonable approach?

[Winn81]

Opponent points are completely out of the players hands. It's a crap shoot who other players are matched up against and how they do. Not sure what happens if a prior opponent drops out of the tournament. Average opponent ELO feels like penalizes those with High ELO and benefits players with lower ELO. Round robin and single elimination format use medal difference which players have influence over.

[jeroenh]

Opponent points are completely out of the players hands. It's a crap shoot who other players are matched up against and how they do. Not sure what happens if a prior opponent drops out of the tournament. Average opponent ELO feels like penalizes those with High ELO and benefits players with lower ELO. Round robin and single elimination format use medal difference which players have influence over.

Yes, opponent points are completely out of your hands, but it does give an indication on how strong your opponent is, which in turn gives weight to the result that you had against that opponent. In that way you get a better balance of the results.

ELO in itself is always tilted towards the lower end. Someone with a high ELO has very little to gain and a lot to lose when playing against much lower rated opponents, that's just the nature of the rating system.

If you argue that it is a crap shoot on how players are matched, then that argument also applies to single elimination tournaments. Also there, you're sometimes unlucky with either dice or cards and you can lose a game against a less skilled opponent.

I would say that Memoir44 is a lot like Texas Holdem when looking at the luck and skill components. It is only over a large amount of games that more skilled players rise to the top.

[Fleurdelysé]

For anyone reading this and thinking about setting up a tournament, some thoughts on setting time limits:
If you are planning to do a turn-based event, use a time-limit of at least 48 hours, and probably more.

Time limits for tournaments work differently than for regular games. In regular games if you move reasonably quickly, you can recover some of your thinking time. So if you move at a reasonable pace, you probably don't get in trouble usually. This is not the case for tournaments, there you do not recover any time, and games in a tournament will be ended forcefully after 2x time limit (the win is awarded to the player taking least time).

Then if you're organising a tournament with random maps, it will be the case that some players get an 8 medal map that needs a lot of turns to finish. The players will also need some time to sleep, so 24 hours to finish a game is way too short.

Indeed, I think Band of Brother's tournaments should have more thinking time, it has been twice I'm not able to finish the first stage because of the early ending of the game. There's also the fact some players do not live on the same continent, so to actually time the match between 2 opponents is difficult. Then we add the fact that some prefer to not enable auto-pass. In some case, it is possible to miss the game by few hours if the time given is too agressive.