Swiss style playoff

[madcowsmind]

I tried this in one of my leagues just to see what it was. It seemed to be like a round robin, however with 6 playoff teams they all played 7 games. Even after some googling, I'm not quite sure how this works and when it would be favored over a round robin. Thanks in advance for any info!

[Matt Arnold]

The way we have it, it's a round robin, but each day the games are scheduled so that a team will always play someone with the same (or similar) record. It's a little hard to explain with 6 teams, I can give a little example with 8 teams though.

Initially, teams are matched at random. After the first day, 4 teams would be 1-0, and 4 teams would be 0-1. On day 2, each of the 1-0 teams match up, and each of the 0-1 teams would. So day 3, you'd have 2 teams that are 2-0, 4 teams that are 1-1, and 2 teams that are 0-2. In each of those groups, teams would play against each other, so after day 3, one team will be 3-0, 3 teams would be 2-1, 3 teams would be 1-2, and 1 team would be 0-3.

If you continued on, the matchups would get a little messier, since the 3-0 team would play against one of the 2-1 teams, for example. But it would continue on around the same setup, with generally speaking the top teams matching up, and the bottom teams matching up.

It's useful because it can naturally seed teams, rather than a pure round robin where you might have a lot of games with un-balanced talent levels.

[madcowsmind]

Very helpful information! Thank you. And I kinda like having this option. So if I have 2 teams advancing from this 6 or 8 team pool to the championship does it get to a point where it decides that these top 2 teams cant mathematically be caught and should move on?

Update: For my 6 team playoff, I noticed it is 7 games each year to determine the top 2 teams for the championship. Very interesting playoff structure.