Last year I said I would work on a Cobr.ai implementation of Single Sided Swiss. This ended up being a bit harder than I anticipated, though I’m still hopeful that something will come together on that end. But I was able to do something else, build a simple desktop application to run Single Sided Swiss tournaments, I’m calling SASS (Side Aware Swiss System)! Right now it’s still missing some features that would make it a full competitor/replacement for Cobra, but I wanted to get it out there and start getting some data on how people feel about single sided swiss. To that end I’m going to be ru ..read more

I’ve now run 3 different single sided swiss tournaments using my proposed algorithm, and figured it was a good time to reflect on what worked and what didn’t work in these tournaments. The three tournaments are uploaded on ABR here: Salvaged Memories Throwback (9 players) Early Bird Gateway Standard (34 players) Early Bird Gateway Startup (32 players) After each of these events I asked participants to fill out a survey. I got 36 responses across the three events (along with some individual results). I’ll summarize these results here, and then talk about what I take from that data and the actua ..read more

Intro [Editor’s Note: SASS has some major coding issues, and so it is not longer being developed. However AesopStables.net is a web implementation of the tool that is a bit more robust] I have created a free application for tournament organizers to run single sided swiss events called the Side Aware Swiss System (SASS) and this article will describe how it pairs. I’m going to cover it first in a hopefully universally understandable way, and then go into a bit more depth of the actual math used for those interested. Why Single Sided Swiss? The very short summary of why I’m looking at single sid ..read more

It’s been a month since my last article, a lot of which I spent trying to improve the run time of my model while trying to simulate tournaments of 128 people. The way my algorithm scales it was taking ~6 hours to run a full simulation of 5000 tournaments w/ 128 people. But while I was on the diversion several people came forward and talked about how that was not the issue they had. I have another post coming up soon with more math[1]. But I think it’s worthwhile to spend some time looking at what a single sided tournament actually looks like in practice, and more importantly how to resolve the ..read more

Having done a fun diversion into a CYOA (thanks to the 7 of you that responded!) in my previous post, I want to return to the core of the math question. I have seen some people circulating more fundamental values questions about what we want. I think those are more important than the math. I’ll re-iterate them here (and my opinions), but hopefully other articles will be out soon. The essential premise behind all of these articles is that DSS has some structural flaws, notably 2-4-1s and IDs that become very prevalent, and are intrinsic to the format. And really the only change we do to allevia ..read more

This is going to be a breakdown of different Single Sided Swiss (SSS) weightings, and the advantages/disadvantages of each. To see a bit about the model check out this old post. I tried to test a good number of different things, and not all of them will be discussed here. If you have questions, please ask! In my model, almost every permutation placed people in the top 8 as consistently, regardless of how heavily different factors were weighted. The number of rounds was essentially the only variable that routinely impacted how frequently someone was placed in the top 8. In my testing it also se ..read more

Time for the rumble we’ve all been waiting for. After showing that SSS can work (with a few different permutations in the previous post) it made sense to try and compare this to what we are actually using for tournaments right now. I made a quick hack of my existing code to have two players play each other twice, alternating sides. So then I wanted to compare how player finishes were distributed in the cut, as this is the primary concern a “competitive” player would be thinking about. Before getting into that data, I want to give QVM a shout out for working on their own proposal for SSS, that ..read more

I wanted to see if single sided Swiss (SSS) would be an interesting alternative format for Netrunner events. For SSS to be reasonable I felt like it needed to do a few things. Would rank players by their skill level to a reasonable degree of accuracy Ensure that most people got to play their two decks an equal number of times It could be done in the same amount of time as double sided swiss (DSS) All three of these constraints play against one another. If we could play an infinite number of games, then we would achieve the most accurate rankings, but would fail 3. Forcing more rounds than is ..read more

This post is mostly to set up some other thoughts on why I decided to test other potential formats for the structure of competitive Netrunner tournaments. Most importantly, the current format does not deliver on some important promises of the structure, people do not play the same number of games, and playing every game is not the optimal strategy. Currently Netrunner tournaments are structured in two phases, a Swiss style tournament, where every entrant plays the same number of games, and then a double elimination bracket for the top few players from Swiss. The big twist, and thing that makes ..read more