Editing Single-elimination tournament (section)

==Evaluation==
{{More citations needed section|date=January 2024}}
The single-elimination format enables a relatively large number of competitors to participate. There are no "dead" matches (perhaps excluding "classification" matches), and no matches where one competitor has more to play for than the other. If a small number of teams play in a single elimination tournament, sometimes a consolation bracket is included to allow the eliminated teams to play more than once. This was the format of the [[Little League World Series]] until 1992.

The format is less suited to games where [[tie (draw)|draws]] are frequent. In [[chess]], each fixture in a single-elimination tournament must be played over multiple matches, because [[draw (chess)|draws are common]], and because white has an advantage over black. In [[association football]], games ending in a draw may be settled in extra time and eventually by a [[penalty shootout (football)|penalty shootout]] or by replaying the fixture.

Another perceived disadvantage is that most competitors are eliminated after relatively few games. Variations such as the [[double-elimination tournament]] allow competitors a single loss while remaining eligible for overall victory. However, losing one game requires the competitor to win more games in order to win the tournament.

In a single-elimination tournament without any seeding, awarding the second place to the loser of the final is unjustified: any of the competitors knocked out before getting to play the losing finalist might have been stronger than the actual losing finalist. In general, it is only fair to use a single-elimination tournament to determine first place. To fairly determine lower places requires some form of [[round-robin tournament|round-robin]] in which each player/team gets the opportunity to face every other player/team.

Also, if the competitors' performance is variable, that is, it depends on a small, varying factor in addition to the actual strength of the competitors, then not only will it become less likely that the strongest competitor actually wins the tournament, in addition the seeding done by the tournament organizers will play a major part in deciding the winner.<ref name="ryv">{{cite web|url=https://www.cerge-ei.cz/pdf/wp/Wp252.pdf|title=The Predictive Power of Noisy Elimination Tournaments|last=Ryvkin|first=Dmitry|date=March 2005|publisher=CERGE-EI|access-date=21 October 2010|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20071022001026/https://www.cerge-ei.cz/pdf/wp/Wp252.pdf|archive-date=22 October 2007|url-status=live}}</ref><ref name="kim">{{cite journal|url=http://epubs.siam.org/doi/abs/10.1137/16M1061783|title=Who Can Win a Single-Elimination Tournament?|last1=Kim|first1=Michael P.|last2=Suksompong|first2=Warut|last3=Vassilevska Williams|first3=Virginia|author3-link= Virginia Vassilevska Williams |year=2017|journal=SIAM Journal on Discrete Mathematics|volume=31|issue=3|pages=1751–1764|doi=10.1137/16M1061783|arxiv=1511.08416|hdl=1721.1/125608|s2cid=1251470}}</ref> As a random factor is always present in a real-world competition, this might easily cause accusations of unfairness.