Bracket Efficiency Recommendations for Casual Tournaments

Our club has our regular meetings on weeknights.  We like to play a double elimination bracket of 7 point matches in the main round and 5 in consolation whenever possible, but those can take several hours even with 4 to 8 people.  Although we're all competitive and want the draw for the bracket to be fair and random, we also want to get home at a reasonable hour on a weeknight.  Therefore, since weeknight tournaments are more casual and laid-back than a weekend tournament (and especially than an ABT tournament) we developed a couple modifications for our brackets to speed things up.

First, we play "first available" in the consolation round.  In other words, we don't use the "Loser goes to A", etc. designations of the bracket.  If you lose in the first round, you're placed in the highest open spot of the consolation bracket.  The big advantage of this is that as soon as two people have lost in the main round, they can start playing immediately.  Using normal placement, the two first losers could be on opposite sides of the bracket and end up each sitting around waiting for the next loser on their side of the bracket.  another advantage is that in cases of uneven players, like 7, the last person to lose will get a bye in the consolation round.  So the slowest part of the bracket gets a little speed boost at that point.  With "first available", there is much less sitting and waiting.  The only disadvantage is that two people can end up playing each other a second time in the consolation round even before getting to the consolation final.  That's not a big deal to us since most of us in the club have played each other countless times anyway.  And even using the normal placements, people can meet up a second time in the consolation finals.

One other trick we use is when we have 6 players.  We use an 8 player bracket, but instead of using the "seed" placement numbers on the main bracket, we just place players in first top 6 slots of the bracket. That way all 6 players start playing immediately instead of 2 people on opposite sides of the bracket both getting byes and waiting. The side-effect is that for the players in the 5th and 6th spots, whoever wins will get a bye to the final. But that's really no extra advantage over normal placement. In both cases, there are 2 players who only need one win to get to finals. But with the modification, you play first and get a bye when you win. With regular placements, you get the bye first. the same concept can be applied to 12 players in a 16 player bracket too, just place them all in the first 12 spots so that you don't have FOUR people with byes sitting around waiting.

A few other ideas for 9, 10, and 11 players in a 16 player bracket:

9 players: Losers of starting 4 matches go to first available consolation spots A, B, G, and H. Semi-final losers go to first available consolation spot of M or N. C, D, E, F, I, J, and K are byes

10 players: Losers of starting 4 matches go to first available consolation spots A, B, G, and H. Semi-final losers go to first available consolation spot of M or N. C, D, E, F, J and K are byes

11 players: Losers of starting 4 matches go to first available consolation spots A, B, G, and H. Semi-final losers go to first available consolation spot of M or N. C, D, E, F, and K are byes