Swiss Tourneys – First Round Losses- by Baneful
June 2014

 

Most of the YGO tournaments out there are "Swiss" or mostly Swiss-based.  It's basically a tournament that grades you on your wins-losses rather than a pure elimination knockout bracket tourney.  This is a very complex topic, but this Wikipedia article explains it very well.

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swiss-system_tournament

 

The way my local shop does it is 4 rounds of Swiss and then elimination from the top 8 scoring players.  Larger tournaments have 10 rounds of Swiss and then top 16/32 elimination to accommodate the large amount of players.

 

I like Swiss.  It lets you be judged by numerous rounds of play rather than just 1 random match.  What if you use a graveyard deck and happen to be paired against the one person who happens to have a remove-from-play deck.  Swiss lets me be judged on my overall capabilities not just one.

 

The one problem with Swiss though is losing in the first round.  When I was a young kid at a tournament and I saw the best players drop because they had lost in round 1, I was confused.  "Why are you dropping?  You're one of the best players".

 

Fact is they knew that a round one loss would likely keep them out of the top 3 (with prizes), so why should they waste their time fighting for 4^th place? 

 

In general, losing earlier hurts more than losing later.  Later games are where the stratified spectrum of players (from best to worst) is fully established.  Losers are paired with losers.  Winners are paired with winners. 

 

In the later Swiss rounds, if you are paired against a winner, it won't hurt your score as much because you lost to a great player.  And let's say you do get a loss after winning the first round, then you get a chance to fight easier opponents that you're better able to win against.

 

In round one, such strata isn't established yet.  If a really good player loses to an inconsistent player round one, they are cut off from facing the other winners.  And by playing against people who lost, you don't have the potential for raising your score as you do if you were to play against a winner.

 

Getting that loss in round 2 isn't as bad.  If you were to statistically compare a group of 0-1 players after round 1 and 1-1 players after round 2, it is likelier that the latter group consists of overall better players.  1-1's prove they could win games and many of them will likely move on to win more.  Sure, sometimes the 0-1 category consists of great players, but most of the time it consists of people who will be 0-4.

 

Defeating an 0-4 won't raise your score very high.  And it's all because you lost the first round.