Seeding and seeding options

Seeding, what it is, and why use it

Seeding is a way to make sure the best players does not meet before the later stages of an event. The best players can be positioned according to a ranking list, a rating list, or any other sorting mechanism the tournament managers feel appropriate. In Cuescore it is possible to seed players manually, or import the seed positions from a ranking list.

The seeding position a player gets will define the starting position in the bracket used. Have a look at this single-elimination bracket to see what position the different seeds get: Single elimination bracket with 16 participants

The seeding positions differ with the bracket chosen for the event, so make use of the preview bracket page (like the one above) to make sure you understand where players end up.

Many tournaments does not make use of seeding. Tournament managers add the players, select the bracket to use, and perform the draw directly. This is a so-called "open" draw, where all participants will be positioned randomly in the bracket. No participant is given any advantage, and the entire process is randomized.

Random draw

We sometimes get questions about the randomness of the draw, and we can assure you that it is totally random. You can easily test this yourself; create an event, add players and select the bracket you want to use (any). Do a draw and check the positions the players got. Then, reset the draw and perform another one. Check the positions again and you'll see the draw will be different. Do this as many times you want.

Seeded draw

When you are doing seeding, you can seed as many players as you want. You do not need to seed all the players. It is quite normal to seed a subset of 4, 8, 16, etc players for an event, depending on the size of it. Many organizations seed a certain percentage of the participants, and leave the rest for random draw. The players that you select not to seed will be randomized in the same way as an open draw. To give an example; if you have a bracket with up to 16 players, you can seed any number of players in it (1-16). If you seed 1,2,3 and 4 for example, the remaining 12 will be randomized. You can test this in the same way as an open draw. Do the draw, check it, reset it (the event will remember the 4 you seeded), and do another draw. You will see the 4 seeded players is always positioned in the same place in the bracket, while the 12 others will get a random position each time. Again, you can do this any number of times to ensure yourself of the randomness of the draw.

Seeded draw with shared numbers

Sometimes, you cannot separate which player should be number 1 or 2 (based upon a ranking or some other criteria). In these cases we have introduced what we call "shared seeding numbers". A shared number is used to randomly select which of those two will be seeded 1 and which will be seeded 2. 

Take this as an example:
I want to seed players from a ranking list. In the ranking list, we have two players with the same amount of ranking points. Therefore, I cannot choose which one should be placed as seed 1 and which is seed 2. Instead I make use of shared numbers, and assign both players seeding number 1. This ensures that when I perform the draw for the tournament, those two players will be randomized between each other for who gets seed 1 and 2 respectively.

Shared numbers can be used for more than two players though, you can used the shared number as many times as you want. Just make sure that the next number used is one higher than the amount of times you used the shared number, or you will get an error "invalid number". If you use seeding number 1 two times (as in the example), the next available number will be 3 (as the number "2" will be assigned to one of the "1"'s when the draw is performed).

With shared ranking positions for both 1  and 2, and if you for some reason  cannot separate number 5 and 6 either, the seeding positions (using shared numbers) would be 1, 1, 3, 4, 5, 5, 7, 8 for example (seeding eight players).

Invalid numbers

Invalid numbers is a number that cannot be used when seeding. If you try to perform a draw when you have a "invalid number" marked in red in your seeding list, you will get an error and the draw will not be successful.

There are two types of invalid seeding numbers:

1. A number that is higher than the number of participants in the event.
   The maximum seeding number you can use is always the number of participants for the event. This is to ensure that walkovers is positioned in the correct place for events that have fewer participants than there is room for in the event. F.ex. if you have 14 players in a bracket with room for 16 participants. The number 15 and 16 is reserved for the walkovers.
2. A number that is unavailable because it is "taken" by a shared number.
   As described in the "shared seeding numbers" section, if you use the number 1 twice, the number 2 is not available. In the same way, if you use the number 1 three times, numbers 2 and 3 is unavailable.
   Shared numbers can appear anywhere in the list, a shared number is defined by the fact that it is used more than once. The next available number is therefore the number of times the shared number has been used + 1.

Seeding transparency

After the draw has been performed, seeding positions will be available for all to see from the participant list of the tournament. The participant list will include all players/teams of course, and from the detailed view of the list anyone can see the seeding position the different participants was assigned. They are marked with their seeding number and a green background color. The participants that was assigned a random number will not show a seeding number. This is to separate the view from pre-seeded players and the rest.

Other use case

With the introduction of shared seeding numbers it's now possible to avoid players from the same club to meet up in early rounds of a tournament. By assigning a shared number per club, the players will be separated in the tournament draw.
Lets say you have three clubs with four players from each club meeting up for a tournament. You can then use seed 1 for players from club A, use seed 5 for players form club B and seed 9 for players from club C.

A combination of seeding from ranking and avoiding same club meetups is another option and can be obtained by following the rules above. First you seed the handful of players by ranking and for the remaining players you can then seed by club.