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Winner's Advantage in Grand Finals

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motbob
Profile Blog Joined July 2008
United States12546 Posts
March 14 2015 08:18 GMT
#1
tl;dr: In double elimination brackets, a 1-0 advantage in Grand Finals for the team coming from Winner's increases the chance of the better team winning the tournament.

In Dota, double-elimination brackets are almost always used, and the grand finals are almost always Bo5. Tournaments have not agreed, however, on whether to give teams from the Winner's Bracket an advantage in Grand Finals. For example, when Alliance and Na`Vi played in the TI3 finals, the series started 0-0, but when those two teams played in Starladder Season 8, Alliance started up 1-0 because they came from the Winner's Bracket.

I'm under the impression that spectators don't like the 1-0 start, but some tournaments (D2CL and Starladder most notably) employ it nonetheless.

Being a massive nerd, I have these various brackets simulated in Excel, so I decided to do some tests and try to test how, in theory, a winner's bracket advantage affects the tournament outcome.

The best team doesn't always win a tournament. Dota is a game with a lot of variance involved, and it only takes a glance at Dota2lounge bet odds to see that. There is a 100% chance that Secret is a better team than M5, but the odds of Secret winning against M5 are not 100%. Nor is the chance of Secret winning a tournament against 7 other scrub teams 100%.

I think that an implicit goal of tournament organizers is to create a format where the best team has a good chance to win. Spectators generally want this. An uproar would surely result if a tournament advanced the second place team to bracket, rather than the first place team, or made the Grand Finals a Bo1. A caveat: spectators want to see good teams earn the win, which is probably why 1-0 advantages leave a bad taste in their mouths.

So if tournament organizers want to create a tournament format where the best team wins most often, spectators be damned, they should create a simulated bracket with teams assigned Elo values (representing "true" skill), run the simulation 10,000 times, and see how many times the best team won with (1) a 1-0 advantage in Grand Finals and (2) no advantage! Or let me do it.

First, I simulated a bracket with two good teams and a bunch of scrubs (1500 Elo, 1480, and a bunch of 1300s). The best team won 51.6% of the time without a Grand Finals advantage, and 52.2% with a 1-0 advantage. That's a 0.6% increase. (Note that the only number we really care about is the increase.)

Second, I simulated an Elo distribution that resembled TI4, meaning that there were a few teams clustered near the top and some semi-competitive teams just afterwards. Here we saw an increase of 1.7% in the best team's win chance from no advantage to 1-0 advantage.

Third, I simulated a very steady drop in Elo (1500, 1490, 1480, 1470...). With this distribution, the best team saw a 1.4% chance increase in winning.

To clarify: one thing to note about the above simulations is that I'm simulating the whole tournament, not the grand finals. In some runs of the simulation where the best team ended up winning, the team lost in Winner's and won GF coming from Loser's. In other runs, the team won Winner's and then won GF.

So with these different distributions of Elo, creating a 1-0 advantage increased the chance of the best team winning the whole tournament. I can't say for sure that that would be true for any combination of teams, but I think that's what these results imply. If y'all want me to test unusual Elo distributions or weird tournament formats (e.g. Bo5 WF instead of Bo3), ask in the comments.

The conclusion I derive from these results is this: if tournament organizers are concerned solely with creating a format where the best team wins, they should have GF with a 1-0 advantage. But the difference between formats seems small enough that, if I were an organizer, I would just keep doing what spectators want (no advantage).
ModeratorGood content always wins.
SpiritoftheTunA
Profile Blog Joined August 2006
United States20903 Posts
Last Edited: 2015-03-14 09:33:57
March 14 2015 09:24 GMT
#2
you're just defining "best team" to describe a team that's won more consistently over a tournament, but what if i want to define "best team" as "the team that can win a best of 5 from 0-0 in this grand finals situation that's about to come up, regardless of recent performance"? you can't just beg the question of what it means to be the "best team" like this, using an elo definition that isn't going to be universally agreed upon as a good metric of "best team at the time of the grand finals"

in other words, you can't claim this without defining "best," and i doubt there will be any universally agreed-upon definitions of "best" here
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motbob
Profile Blog Joined July 2008
United States12546 Posts
March 14 2015 09:33 GMT
#3
On March 14 2015 18:24 SpiritoftheTunA wrote:
you're just defining "best team" to describe a team that's won more consistently over a tournament, but what if i want to define "best team" as "the team that can win a best of 5 from 0-0 in this grand finals situation that's about to come up, regardless of recent performance"? you can't just beg the question of what it means to be the "best team" like this, using an elo definition that isn't going to be universally agreed upon as a good metric of "best team at the time of the grand finals"

I am definitely not describing "best team" as the team that "won more consistently over a tournament," and I'm confused as to why you think that.
ModeratorGood content always wins.
SpiritoftheTunA
Profile Blog Joined August 2006
United States20903 Posts
Last Edited: 2015-03-14 09:41:56
March 14 2015 09:35 GMT
#4
the point stands that elo (a measure of their relative position of being able to win over lots of games) can't capture intangibles like grand-finals choke factor, grand-finals pocket strat or strat countering, etc

this approach makes more sense for games like chess, but dota is a game where pick/ban metagaming and particular style clashes can result in consistent "elo upsets": that is, elo isn't a complete description of relative standing, since individual teams can have individual interactions that don't necessarily accord with their elo standing when it comes down to head-to-head matchups
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motbob
Profile Blog Joined July 2008
United States12546 Posts
March 14 2015 09:43 GMT
#5
On March 14 2015 18:35 SpiritoftheTunA wrote:
the point stands that ELO (a measure of their relative position of being able to win over lots of games) can't capture intangibles like grand-finals choke factor, grand-finals pocket strat or strat countering, etc

Maybe my use of the term "Elo" is confusing. When I talk about Elo, I am talking about actual, "true" skill; that is, the unknowable actual ability of a team to win matches. We try to approximate teams' (or, in SC2, players') skill by using metrics like the Gosugamers ranking or Alugilac, but the true skill is unknowable. But, just because it is unknowable in real life doesn't mean we can't use it in a simulation.

As to all those other factors, those are sort of like random chance. They don't really matter in the simulation. Since the team in the loser's bracket could just as easily be the more choke-inclined team as the team in the winner's bracket, the simulation isn't biased by the presence of those factors. Over the course of 10,000 runs of the simulation, those sorts of things would cancel out. If you disagree, I'd love to hear why.
ModeratorGood content always wins.
SpiritoftheTunA
Profile Blog Joined August 2006
United States20903 Posts
Last Edited: 2015-03-14 09:53:09
March 14 2015 09:48 GMT
#6
extreme example: there's 100 teams, the two best are at 1500 and 1470, but 1500 got there by running a strat that's particularly good at beating 60 of the other teams (say, 70% of the time), 1470 got there by running a strat that's good at beating 38 of the other teams (70% of the time) and the 1500 team (55% of the time): in the head to head, the 1470 tends to win against the 1500, but that isn't reflected in the number alone. can this situation not exist in your model?

the numbers are fudged and i'm sure the ELO would turn out different with those winrates entered, but the point remains. i realize the 1470 rating might climb above the 1500 if they faced head to head over and over and got adjusted to reflect their 55% winrate, but with lots of games against the other teams, they tend to fall back into the relative positino of 1470<1500

elo, from my understanding, doesn't actually refer to an unknowable true skill of a team, it refers to a number that's generated based on win/loss history against other teams with elo ratings in the same league
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motbob
Profile Blog Joined July 2008
United States12546 Posts
March 14 2015 09:52 GMT
#7
On March 14 2015 18:48 SpiritoftheTunA wrote:
extreme example: there's 100 teams, the two best are at 1500 and 1470, but 1500 got there by running a strat that's particularly good at beating 60 of the other teams (say, 70% of the time), 1470 got there by running a strat that's good at beating 38 of the other teams (70% of the time) and the 1500 team (55% of the time): in the head to head, the 1470 tends to win against the 1500, but that isn't reflected in the number alone. can this situation not exist in your model?

the numbers are fudged and i'm sure the ELO would turn out different with those winrates entered, but the point remains

Yeah, that happens some of the time in real life. But also in real life you may have a 1500 and 1470 team and the 1500 matches up super well against the 1470 team, more so than the difference in overall skill suggests. Both sides of that coin exists and act to cancel each other out over the course of 10,000 runs.

Anyway, I'm not really seeing the connection between any of these criticisms and the final conclusion of the post. How do these alleged flaws in the methodology change the result?
ModeratorGood content always wins.
SpiritoftheTunA
Profile Blog Joined August 2006
United States20903 Posts
Last Edited: 2015-03-14 10:02:24
March 14 2015 09:54 GMT
#8
the result is fine if you define "best team" to accord with elo as how you've set it up in the premise, i just disagree with that definition of "best team." i think the problem that top teams can have idiosyncratic modifiers against each other, like tending to choke against one particular team or style, isn't one that can be smoothed out in this kind of simulation that assumes the elo rating differential, with each team only having one elo rating regardless of opponent, is the singular measure of probable outcome
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motbob
Profile Blog Joined July 2008
United States12546 Posts
March 14 2015 10:07 GMT
#9
On March 14 2015 18:54 SpiritoftheTunA wrote:
the result is fine if you define "best team" to accord with elo as how you've set it up in the premise, i just disagree with that definition of "best team." i think the problem that top teams can have idiosyncratic modifiers against each other, like tending to choke against one particular team or style, isn't one that can be smoothed out in this kind of simulation that assumes the elo rating differential, with each team only having one elo rating regardless of opponent, is the singular measure of probable outcome

OK, but again, why? Give me an alternate definition of "best team," and explain why the post's result (that a 1-0 advantage leads to the "best team" team winning the tournament more often) changes.
ModeratorGood content always wins.
SpiritoftheTunA
Profile Blog Joined August 2006
United States20903 Posts
March 14 2015 10:14 GMT
#10
as a fan of seeing a full BO5, i'll define "best team" to be the "team that tends to win a BO5 in the grand finals more in a head to head matchup." this definition of "best team" is dynamic and depends on which 2 teams are in the grand finals, since the only thing that goes into this is their ability to win against the grand finals opponents.

this "best team" can be the team with the lower Elo, so long as they tend to win against their fated opponent in the grand finals

given this a 1-0 advantage for the team that tends to get into the winners bracket spot more would decrease that team's chance of winning, were they the "best team" per my definition
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motbob
Profile Blog Joined July 2008
United States12546 Posts
March 14 2015 10:24 GMT
#11
On March 14 2015 19:14 SpiritoftheTunA wrote:
as a fan of seeing a full BO5, i'll define "best team" to be the "team that tends to win a BO5 in the grand finals more in a head to head matchup." this definition of "best team" is dynamic and depends on which 2 teams are in the grand finals, since the only thing that goes into this is their ability to win against the grand finals opponents.

this "best team" can be the team with the lower Elo, so long as they tend to win against their fated opponent in the grand finals

given this a 1-0 advantage for the team that tends to get into the winners bracket spot more would decrease that team's chance of winning, were they the "best team" per my definition

OK, why would the 1-0 decrease that team's chance of winning? If this definition is so dynamic, half of the time the team with the 1-0 advantage would be the "best team." Since half of the time, your dynamic "best team" is on the winner's side, and half of the time it's on the loser's side, things would seem to be a wash. Unless there is some reason why your "best team" would usually be on loser's side?
ModeratorGood content always wins.
SpiritoftheTunA
Profile Blog Joined August 2006
United States20903 Posts
Last Edited: 2015-03-14 10:30:42
March 14 2015 10:25 GMT
#12
no you're right. my bad. i guess my issue is that most people don't necessarily want the format to be such that the best team wins more, they just want the grand finals bo5 to seem more fair in a vacuum, a sentiment i generally agree with.
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motbob
Profile Blog Joined July 2008
United States12546 Posts
March 14 2015 10:33 GMT
#13
On March 14 2015 19:25 SpiritoftheTunA wrote:
no you're right. my bad. i guess my issue is that most people don't necessarily want the format to be such that the best team wins more, they just want the grand finals bo5 to seem more fair in a vacuum, a sentiment i generally agree with.

Yeah, it's something I agree with too. I want to see more games in the GF so the small % chance of a "better" result doesn't really matter to me.
ModeratorGood content always wins.
LightTemplar
Profile Blog Joined August 2011
Ireland481 Posts
Last Edited: 2015-03-14 12:42:12
March 14 2015 12:40 GMT
#14
So in your simulation did the 1-0 advantage lead to closer finals than 0-0?
By which i mean how many more times did more series end 3-2 with and without winners bracked advantage? My initial assumption would be 0-0 but I may be missing something
"Thoughts are always there, the mind can't stop" - Grubby
Kupon3ss
Profile Joined May 2008
時の回廊10066 Posts
Last Edited: 2015-03-14 13:20:05
March 14 2015 13:18 GMT
#15
simply put, this only works if the algorithm places the same value upon a team whose chances to win is steady throughout a boX and through a tournament - two great counter examples would be Navi at TI2 and VG at TI4, both of those teams were significantly better at Bo3s than Bo5s due to the volatile nature of their strategy. Truely great teams tend to change and learn during the process of a big tournament and assigning some inherent elo can't be further than a representation of the realities of dota.

If all you're concerned about is the "team with best elo" then it becomes rather reductive - why even have an elimination bracket at all, just do a quadriple round robin - that increases the chances of the "best team" under your definition winning significantly more
When in doubt, just believe in yourself and press buttons
motbob
Profile Blog Joined July 2008
United States12546 Posts
March 14 2015 13:26 GMT
#16
On March 14 2015 22:18 Kupon3ss wrote:
simply put, this only works if the algorithm places the same value upon a team whose chances to win is steady throughout a boX and through a tournament - two great counter examples would be Navi at TI2 and VG at TI4, both of those teams were significantly better at Bo3s than Bo5s due to the volatile nature of their strategy. Truely great teams tend to change and learn during the process of a big tournament and assigning some inherent elo can't be further than a representation of the realities of dota.

If all you're concerned about is the "team with best elo" then it becomes rather reductive - why even have an elimination bracket at all, just do a quadriple round robin - that increases the chances of the "best team" under your definition winning significantly more

As discussed above, the "truly great" adaptive team may be on the winner's side or the loser's side of grand finals, so that particular factor is a wash.

The purpose of this simulation was not to test radically different tournament formats, but rather to explore a minor split between tournament organizers on how to run things.
ModeratorGood content always wins.
Kupon3ss
Profile Joined May 2008
時の回廊10066 Posts
March 14 2015 13:28 GMT
#17
the adaptive team is significantly more likely to be on the loser's side than winners, you can imitate this by running the same simulation with a "growth" stat on your team's elos
When in doubt, just believe in yourself and press buttons
motbob
Profile Blog Joined July 2008
United States12546 Posts
March 14 2015 13:30 GMT
#18
On March 14 2015 22:28 Kupon3ss wrote:
the adaptive team is significantly more likely to be on the loser's side than winners, you can imitate this by running the same simulation with a "growth" stat on your team's elos

I don't understand why "adaptive" teams are more likely to be in losers than winners.
ModeratorGood content always wins.
Kupon3ss
Profile Joined May 2008
時の回廊10066 Posts
March 14 2015 13:33 GMT
#19
simulate the bracket with some some "stagant" teams (say 1500 + 1.0 per game) and some "adaptive teams" with (1470 + 2.5 per game)
When in doubt, just believe in yourself and press buttons
motbob
Profile Blog Joined July 2008
United States12546 Posts
March 14 2015 14:07 GMT
#20
I created a variable for adapting well and adapting poorly. I made the variable ridiculously powerful: 20 rating per round for well-adapting teams and 5 per round for teams that didn't adapt well. 8 team, double elim, teams close in terms of skill (1500, 1490...).

I assumed that teams would adapt equally well whether they were watching games or playing games. That is, if Secret were sitting on the sidelines watching Na`Vi and EG play in Loser's, Secret would not be disadvantaged just because they were taking notes instead of playing. This assumption was made because to assume otherwise would be to say that the lower bracket team has an inherent advantage because they played more games, which I don't think Kupon was arguing. Also, I don't think I know how to code a "per game" adaptation in Excel.

In grand finals, both teams had adapted "five times," for an increase of 100 points for adapters and 20 points for non-adapters. The result remained the same: the "better team" as defined by a static Elo value won 0.5% more often in a bracket with a 1-0 advantage. (The bracket is different from the ones in earlier tests, so the 0.5% figure isn't comparable to any of the previous results.)
ModeratorGood content always wins.
Kupon3ss
Profile Joined May 2008
時の回廊10066 Posts
Last Edited: 2015-03-14 14:17:37
March 14 2015 14:14 GMT
#21
The idea is that the team that's grown more during the tournament becomes the "higher" elo team by the end and, as you've just shown, has a lower chance of winning the tournament depending on where the inflection point. Lower bracket teams that are better able to adapt definitely get more chances at iteration.

These observations are in general much closer to what we've seen from the 3 non-joke TIs, though TI1 would arguably have the same 100/20 rating adaptivity that motbob proposed due to the fact that 1/2 the teams had never played dota2 and were unable to actually set hotkeys

When in doubt, just believe in yourself and press buttons
motbob
Profile Blog Joined July 2008
United States12546 Posts
Last Edited: 2015-03-14 14:35:34
March 14 2015 14:29 GMT
#22
I ran a test for the "best team" as defined by Kupon: the team that had the highest initial skill while also having the "good adapter" trait. As Kupon predicted/indicated, that team won less often in the 1-0 format by about 1.2%. This is using the 20/5 adaptation, and I think I agree with Kupon that this is close to what TI1 would have been like.

EDIT: Using Kupon's original suggestion of 2.5/1 for adaptation, the original result resurfaced: the "best team" as defined by the highest static ELO with the " good adapter" value won more often under the 1-0 format. So the result depends on the strength of the adaptation variable.
ModeratorGood content always wins.
Kupon3ss
Profile Joined May 2008
時の回廊10066 Posts
March 14 2015 14:39 GMT
#23
of course, though my statement of the 2.5 - 1 ratio was written upon a per game basis and not on a per round one

Overall the differences are so minute and in Dota at least the full bo5 appeals to spectators more. Honestly given what we've seen in TI2/TI3/TI4 we've always seen a more stagnant team in the winner's bracket than the loser's bracket.
When in doubt, just believe in yourself and press buttons
Salazarz
Profile Blog Joined April 2012
Korea (South)2591 Posts
Last Edited: 2015-03-14 14:50:04
March 14 2015 14:47 GMT
#24
There is literally no such thing as a 'best' team in anything, not just Dota, and any kind of a model created to find the best team is always going to be flawed. There is always the question of form, mental factors, preparation, and a ton of other variables that simply can't be quantified in a number - this is a big part of the reason as to why any kind of power ranks were always a hotbed of debate. That aside, tournaments are not, and never were a tool to find the best team and award them with the prize. Tournaments are made to provide a spectator experience, and a rather large majority of viewers seem to agree that 'clean slate' starts in the finals tend to provide more entertaining series. On top of that, literally any bracket format is already massively flawed at finding 'the best' team, and you could also argue that things like playing in front of a crowd, having to adhere to various live schedules, having to travel to the location etc etc also bring in external variables that may be counter-productive to the best team winning.

It's always going to be a compromise between 'fair' and 'viewable', and since we can't even honestly say that the team coming from the winners bracket of a tournament is always the 'better' team, to me 1-0 starts make little sense.
Faruko
Profile Joined April 2013
Chile34171 Posts
March 14 2015 18:47 GMT
#25
get rid of useless lower bracket, no advantage

problem solved
Ross was right // "Jesus Christ nahaz is doing shots before my eyes" (Sn0_Man, 2018)
MetalMercury
Profile Joined January 2015
United States1161 Posts
March 14 2015 18:52 GMT
#26
On March 14 2015 23:47 Salazarz wrote:
There is literally no such thing as a 'best' team in anything, not just Dota, and any kind of a model created to find the best team is always going to be flawed. There is always the question of form, mental factors, preparation, and a ton of other variables that simply can't be quantified in a number - this is a big part of the reason as to why any kind of power ranks were always a hotbed of debate. That aside, tournaments are not, and never were a tool to find the best team and award them with the prize. Tournaments are made to provide a spectator experience, and a rather large majority of viewers seem to agree that 'clean slate' starts in the finals tend to provide more entertaining series. On top of that, literally any bracket format is already massively flawed at finding 'the best' team, and you could also argue that things like playing in front of a crowd, having to adhere to various live schedules, having to travel to the location etc etc also bring in external variables that may be counter-productive to the best team winning.

It's always going to be a compromise between 'fair' and 'viewable', and since we can't even honestly say that the team coming from the winners bracket of a tournament is always the 'better' team, to me 1-0 starts make little sense.


Someone earlier mentioned that the winner's team always stagnates more than the losers team, which is actually incorrect as far as I'm concerned. In International history, the winner's bracket champion has won the grand finals in EVERY SINGLE TOURNAMENT. This idea of lower bracket teams adapting more on the largest stage is bullshit. I find that people are largely terrible at judging athletic performance, and this is exactly why we need numbers.

I'm actually really surprised at some of the comments in this thread chain; they show a little bit of a misunderstanding of how statistics function when it comes to athletic performance.

Let's start with a bit of a basic premise, and work our way down from there.

Are there factors that we cannot measure that impact team performance? YES. But the question after that becomes: if we can't measure it, why do we care about it? Even if it impacts performance, it's not predictable. If it were predictable, we could model it it. And the answer to that seems to never be satisfying from a statisticians point of view.

However, just because something is intangible doesn't mean we can't measure it. Say a team always loses in certain situation: they can't win in front of crowds, they suck at traveling, whatever it might be. Then that gets accounted for into their ELO or their performance statistics when they actually lose the game. In fact, for all teams that have a sufficient amount of games played, these factors are ALWAYS accounted for in principle by mathematical ranking systems. I've heard people counter by saying that these don't happen enough to impact the mathematics much, which could be true. BUT, if that is true, then why do you care about it? If the mathematical ranking system doesn't have enough sample to judge it, you certainly don't have enough anecdotal evidence to judge it either.
SKC
Profile Joined October 2010
Brazil18828 Posts
March 14 2015 19:48 GMT
#27
The winner's bracket champion has not won the grand finals in every single TI.
MrCon
Profile Blog Joined August 2010
France29748 Posts
March 14 2015 21:30 GMT
#28
So basically bo1 advantage gives 2% chance more, so yeah I agree with the conclusion that no winner's advantage should be used.
MetalMercury
Profile Joined January 2015
United States1161 Posts
March 14 2015 21:44 GMT
#29
On March 15 2015 04:48 SKC wrote:
The winner's bracket champion has not won the grand finals in every single TI.


You're right I think, iG was the team that won from the losers bracket. My fault.
SKC
Profile Joined October 2010
Brazil18828 Posts
Last Edited: 2015-03-14 21:55:38
March 14 2015 21:46 GMT
#30
That's simplifying a bit too far. That's not the advantage they get in the series. Maybe if you math it out for a Bo1 finals, the odds of the best team winning wouldn't be that much lower, because a good portion of those ~50% comes from before the finals even happen, but everyone would agree it's not a good system for obvious reasons. Remember you are only changing the finals but simulating the whole tournament. You could randomly declare a winner in the finals and the best team could still have decent odds of winning it.

That's actually a good question, what would be the odds of the best team winning if the finals were completelly random? It's at least a decent baseline to know. It should depend a lot on the kind of teams you supply the system. If the teams that reach the finals were ussually evenly matched, it wouldn't even change that much.

In the end the goal of a tournament is not strictly for the best team to win, so whathever feels fair is more important than whathever little advantage you can math it out of simulations. Fighting games have always felt true double elim is the best. A lot of people that watch Dota or SC2 would hate it.
zdfgucker
Profile Joined August 2011
China594 Posts
March 14 2015 23:25 GMT
#31
I love hearing about calculations and conclusions when no data whatsoever is provided. Makes me ignore any results.

Loser bracket teams play way more games, so it's a loss-loss situation. Start at 0-1 disadvantage or play (possibly) another game when you're burned out? Either way you're fucked, so I don't see any good argument speaking against WB advantage.
fLDm
nojok
Profile Joined May 2011
France15845 Posts
March 15 2015 00:20 GMT
#32
I prefer WB advantage because if loser's bracket can win while going even against the other team, specially true when there are only two strong contenders. And also the big fucking huge achievement from winning back from a bo3 deficit, that's not anyway near close to winning the tournament while going 3 4 against the other top team (0 2 in WB final and 3 2 in grand final).. Tbh I would prefer 1 bo3 advantage for the team from the winner bracket, at worst it makes a one sided 2 0 or 6 games so it's only one more or less game than a short/full bo5. It used to be like this for war3 and CS. In the end everyone lose 2 bo3 except the winner. Chances for a GSL like final are higher but epic victories are more epic.

I think most of people prefer bo5 no advantage so it's fine the way tournaments run it.
"Back then teams that won were credited, now it's called throw. I think it's sad." - Kuroky - Flap Flap Wings!
Buckyman
Profile Joined May 2014
1364 Posts
March 15 2015 06:34 GMT
#33
I prefer Bo5 no advantage because it means I get to watch more grand finals games on average.
Badjas
Profile Blog Joined October 2008
Netherlands2038 Posts
March 15 2015 07:21 GMT
#34
Tournaments should get rid of winner's advantage. Because people complain about it. Alternatively they should play it out like this:

The upper bracket final's winner (team A) should play against the lower bracket final's winner (team B) in a BO3 or BO5.

If team B loses, they have lost twice and should be eliminated, team A is the winner.

If team A loses, both team A and B have lost once in the playoffs. Now they are even. A BO1 or BO3 should be played to see who will lose a second time, so that a winner can be declared. (There are already three "finals" named. UB finals, LB finals, grand finals... this finals should have a proper name. And ultimate final isn't it I think.)


If you support this concept but are against winner bracket's advantage... BO3 grand finals followed by BO1 "ultimate finals" is exactly the same as BO5 with 1 game winner's advantage, save for presentation (and a rest period that would be influential actually).
I <3 the internet, I <3 you
eonrulz
Profile Blog Joined March 2013
United Kingdom225 Posts
March 15 2015 09:43 GMT
#35
I just want to know what the errors on those percentages are. A 0.6% and a 1.7% increase are very small differences - they could well be within error, in which case there's no statistically significant change. Any chance of calculating that? Until there's evidence of statistical significance, I'm not sure there's any point even discussing the results here.
Boop!
Sr18
Profile Joined April 2006
Netherlands1141 Posts
March 15 2015 10:24 GMT
#36
The conclusion is logical though. If you run a single elimination tournament, out of all the contestants the best team will have the highest chance of winning. This means that in a double elimination tournament, the best team will have the highest chance of reaching the grand finals through the winners bracket. Giving this team another advantage (1 game lead for instance) will increase their chance of winning the tournament. So it makes perfect sense that having a winners bracket advantage in the grand finals will - over a large enough number of tournaments - result in a larger chance of the best team winning.

Offtopic: this doesn't change the fact that I really dislike watching tournaments with winner bracket advantages as it kills the grand finals hype for me.
If it ain't Dutch, it ain't Park Yeong Min - CJ fighting!
DucK-
Profile Blog Joined January 2009
Singapore11447 Posts
March 15 2015 12:28 GMT
#37
The fairest way to deal with Winner's Bracket advantage is to have the team from the Loser's Bracket win TWICE. After all, the Winner's Bracket team never ever had a second chance.
Bigtony
Profile Blog Joined June 2011
United States1606 Posts
March 15 2015 17:18 GMT
#38
On March 15 2015 16:21 Badjas wrote:
Tournaments should get rid of winner's advantage. Because people complain about it. Alternatively they should play it out like this:

The upper bracket final's winner (team A) should play against the lower bracket final's winner (team B) in a BO3 or BO5.

If team B loses, they have lost twice and should be eliminated, team A is the winner.

If team A loses, both team A and B have lost once in the playoffs. Now they are even. A BO1 or BO3 should be played to see who will lose a second time, so that a winner can be declared. (There are already three "finals" named. UB finals, LB finals, grand finals... this finals should have a proper name. And ultimate final isn't it I think.)


If you support this concept but are against winner bracket's advantage... BO3 grand finals followed by BO1 "ultimate finals" is exactly the same as BO5 with 1 game winner's advantage, save for presentation (and a rest period that would be influential actually).


This is the perfect solution but it doesn't work because of the unpredictable nature of how long the matches will take and how many matches you will have. Tournaments cannot afford to under-deliver or need an extra 3 hours for the final BO3.
Push 2 Harder
Elyvilon
Profile Joined August 2008
United States13143 Posts
March 15 2015 17:43 GMT
#39
On March 15 2015 21:28 DucK- wrote:
The fairest way to deal with Winner's Bracket advantage is to have the team from the Loser's Bracket win TWICE. After all, the Winner's Bracket team never ever had a second chance.

I agree that is this is the fairest way, but that's not necessarily the same as being the best way.
Liquipedia
Badjas
Profile Blog Joined October 2008
Netherlands2038 Posts
March 15 2015 19:07 GMT
#40
On March 16 2015 02:18 Bigtony wrote:
Show nested quote +
On March 15 2015 16:21 Badjas wrote:
Tournaments should get rid of winner's advantage. Because people complain about it. Alternatively they should play it out like this:

The upper bracket final's winner (team A) should play against the lower bracket final's winner (team B) in a BO3 or BO5.

If team B loses, they have lost twice and should be eliminated, team A is the winner.

If team A loses, both team A and B have lost once in the playoffs. Now they are even. A BO1 or BO3 should be played to see who will lose a second time, so that a winner can be declared. (There are already three "finals" named. UB finals, LB finals, grand finals... this finals should have a proper name. And ultimate final isn't it I think.)


If you support this concept but are against winner bracket's advantage... BO3 grand finals followed by BO1 "ultimate finals" is exactly the same as BO5 with 1 game winner's advantage, save for presentation (and a rest period that would be influential actually).


This is the perfect solution but it doesn't work because of the unpredictable nature of how long the matches will take and how many matches you will have. Tournaments cannot afford to under-deliver or need an extra 3 hours for the final BO3.

That is indeed a problem. I do like the idea of having a proper break before the "ultimate final" as it will give the losing UB winner a chance to come up with a new strategy (they haven't lost before).

If the Upper bracket winner wins undefeated, there will be no "ultimate final".
Filling that space with a second/third placer match doesn't really work as the lower bracket finals already provided this.
A show match is an option with various methods. Show matches can also be much more loosely scheduled... Will it be a good trade-in for the lost hype? (question purposefully left unanswered)
I <3 the internet, I <3 you
Oktyabr
Profile Joined July 2011
Singapore2234 Posts
March 17 2015 00:45 GMT
#41
On March 15 2015 03:47 Faruko wrote:
get rid of useless lower bracket, no advantage

problem solved


You'll get rid of amazing storylines at the same time.
Moustache Cash Stash
Profile Joined February 2014
United States222 Posts
March 17 2015 02:51 GMT
#42
On March 15 2015 16:21 Badjas wrote:
Tournaments should get rid of winner's advantage. Because people complain about it. Alternatively they should play it out like this:

The upper bracket final's winner (team A) should play against the lower bracket final's winner (team B) in a BO3 or BO5.

If team B loses, they have lost twice and should be eliminated, team A is the winner.

If team A loses, both team A and B have lost once in the playoffs. Now they are even. A BO1 or BO3 should be played to see who will lose a second time, so that a winner can be declared. (There are already three "finals" named. UB finals, LB finals, grand finals... this finals should have a proper name. And ultimate final isn't it I think.)


If you support this concept but are against winner bracket's advantage... BO3 grand finals followed by BO1 "ultimate finals" is exactly the same as BO5 with 1 game winner's advantage, save for presentation (and a rest period that would be influential actually).

This would be the most preferred method for Grand Finals, but I doubt Dota 2 could pull it off due to the time constraints and too many games in a row. However, a BO1 couldn't be used for the so called "ultimate finals." Say the winner's bracket team loses the first BO3 2-0. They could just win the BO1 and be crowned champs, but they have an overall record of 1-2 in the grand finals. And I doubt anyone would be happy with this. So in an ideal situation, we could run it with potentially 2 BO3 or BO5, but that would be too difficult logistically. Game tournaments that do this though, like most Smash tourneys, turn out pretty well.
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