Well, I was just trying to show that there are multiple valid philosophies when running a playoff. Things can be exciting even if the better team isn't definitely going to win. Maybe an NBA vs NCAA hoops comparison would have been clearer, but that comparison and the one I used serve the same purpose in my mind.

I would say that UK football has a good example of more games = the better team winning but unfortunately thats not really the case.

In UK football (soccer) we have the FA cup, Premier league (plus division 1,2,3) and the League Cup (now known as the Carling Cup i think). Obviously in the premier league you play every other team twice, at the end of the season the best team wins, nearly always.

In the FA cup they play a 32 team single elim bracket and usually the top atleast 2 of the top 4 teams in the country make the semi finals but sometimes a wildcard team for a lower division make it all the way to the finals even though they would probably end up bottom of the table in the Premier league.

However, in the League Cup they play a 32 team single elim bracket using aggregate score (you play 2 games against your opponent and add the scores together) which SHOULD end up with the better team winning every time but doesn't. This is mainly due to the fact that this cup is seen as less important than the FA cup and Premier league and so teams usually field their young players, rising stars etc instead of their best 11. This often results in "upsets". The finals of this cup are conversely played as a single match, with extra time and penalties to solve a draw.

Penalties are no guarantee of the better team winning. If anything the worse team can deliberately play for a draw to get to penalties as their chances of winning go up by a massive amount.

Simple fact of sports/esports is that in most cases, a league system as used in the UK (all teams play in a single league, no east/west divisions like Basketball or Baseball etc) is the only way to truly guarantee that the best team wins. I've never upderstood the whole play a league then have play-offs thing, its just not how we do things here and I've never understood why its necessary. The only play-offs we have is for a team to be promoted up to a higher division, the teams in 2nd-5th fight it out for the second promotion spot while the team in 1st win promotion automatically.

The Premier league is often decided, as it was this year, on the final day of the season. The only draw back is that when a team outclass all their rivals by a large margin, they can have already guaranteed the championship with anything as much as 10 games left to play.

I see SC2 as more of the tennis model tho, men tennis is usually won by the best player because of the 5 set matches. In 3 set tourneys there are a lot more upsets than in the majors like Wimbledon (sorry Rafa!). I would like to see sc2 tourneys be bo5 all the way thru, including the finals

bbm

United Kingdom1320 Posts

July 17 2012 16:06 GMT

#63

If the match feels like a foregone conclusion, that's because it pretty much is. There have been 31 Bo7 series that reached the point of 3-1 or 3-0. Of those, in only one match did the disadvantaged player eventually win the series.

That's right. You could have closed out the stream and gone to bed after a 3-1 or 3-0 result and only regretted it 3.2% of the time.

Out of curiosity, what percentage of games went from 3-1 or 3-0 to 4-3 in either direction?

You can't state in your first point that the last game is vastly superior all the time, and then only include the % chance that the disadvantaged player won. That's silly! Your 96.8% of unregretted sleep time includes snoozing through DRG vs MMA, because the disadvantaged player didn't win in the end.

I don't expect it to be a wildly higher number, just pointing out that it's a poor statistic to give.

andrewlt

United States7702 Posts

July 17 2012 19:54 GMT

#64

I prefer best of five as well. It's for the reason the NCAA men's basketball tournament is beloved, even though the games are far inferior in quality to the NBA.

jobber123rd

United States501 Posts

July 18 2012 04:12 GMT

#65

On July 17 2012 22:15 emythrel wrote:

Show nested quote +

I would say that UK football has a good example of more games = the better team winning but unfortunately thats not really the case.

In UK football (soccer) we have the FA cup, Premier league (plus division 1,2,3) and the League Cup (now known as the Carling Cup i think). Obviously in the premier league you play every other team twice, at the end of the season the best team wins, nearly always.

In the FA cup they play a 32 team single elim bracket and usually the top atleast 2 of the top 4 teams in the country make the semi finals but sometimes a wildcard team for a lower division make it all the way to the finals even though they would probably end up bottom of the table in the Premier league.

However, in the League Cup they play a 32 team single elim bracket using aggregate score (you play 2 games against your opponent and add the scores together) which SHOULD end up with the better team winning every time but doesn't. This is mainly due to the fact that this cup is seen as less important than the FA cup and Premier league and so teams usually field their young players, rising stars etc instead of their best 11. Th is often results in "upsets". The finals of this cup are conversely played as a single match, with extra time and penalties to solve a draw.

Penalties are no guarantee of the better team winning. If anything the worse team can deliberately play for a draw to get to penalties as their chances of winning go up by a massive amount.

Simple fact of sports/esports is that in most cases, a league system as used in the UK (all teams play in a single league, no east/west divisions like Basketball or Baseball etc) is the only way to truly guarantee that the best team wins. I've never upderstood the whole play a league then have play-offs thing, its just not how we do things here and I've never understood why its necessary. The only play-offs we have is for a team to be promoted up to a higher division, the teams in 2nd-5th fight it out for the second promotion spot while the team in 1st win promotion automatically.

The Premier league is often decided, as it was this year, on the final day of the season. The only draw back is that when a team outclass all their rivals by a large margin, they can have already guaranteed the championship with anything as much as 10 games left to play.

I see SC2 as more of the tennis model tho, men tennis is usually won by the best player because of the 5 set matches. In 3 set tourneys there are a lot more upsets than in the majors like Wimbledon (sorry Rafa!). I would like to see sc2 tourneys be bo5 all the way thru, including the finals

There are a lot of reasons why and how post-season play developed as a staple of American sport, but perhaps the most relevant to the present day is that playoffs generate more interest in the sport and revenue, and the team owners, who control the leagues, aren't going to pass that up (see the last-minute decision by MLB to expand their playoffs this year).

The better team winning doesn't matter as much as teams making the most money possible. The National and American Leagues of baseball could be run as single tables, but with the current format, almost half the teams could be playing "meaningful" games in the last month of the season, and a third of the MLB clubs will participate in the playoffs.

On a related note, one of the reasons why there is no promotion and relegation in the professional sports leagues in the USA is that the National League's promise of a "closed shop" of franchises with territorial exclusivity in the late 1870's encouraged prospective owners to invest money in clubs, leading to the NL's domination of the baseball scene for the remainder of the century. Also, back when some of these leagues were forming, they had too few clubs to have more than one tier. Travel costs were prohibitive (the National League's original New York and Philadelphia teams were expelled after the NL's first season for refusing to travel to play the western teams (Chicago, St. Louis, Cincinnati, and Louisville)).

Just for comparison, England's Football League split into two divisions after reaching a total of 24 clubs in 1892. MLB wouldn't have that many until 1969 (at which point they did their own split, but it was divisionally within each league, creating an extra round of playoffs). The NFL wouldn't get there until its merger with the AFL in 1970, the NBA went fron 23 to 25 in 1988, and the NHL got to 24 in 1992. By then, playoffs were well entrenched, and with TV being a big revenue generator, it would be silly to take guaranteed "big games" off the calendar.