tournament playoffs

I made this same comment a while ago but it never picked up momentum and I thought I'd give it another shot now in the hopes that maybe my suggestion might be considered.

I enjoy playing the daily tournaments here. But I've never liked the fact that ties are not broken. I am in a 50 player tournament now which is set up very nicely: 50 players, 10 groups of 5 players. It's very competitive so that only the top player from each group will advance. So, the next round will (*should*) see 2 groups of 5 players with the winners advancing into a final.

This is all contingent on there being no ties. So, the excitement of having only one player advance from the group will be tempered by the fact that a tie might send 2 or even 3 players to the next round.

Why can't there be a playoff match (or matches) to break ties? The participants (if there are more than 3) can be chosen randomly as to who will get a bye, etc. Black can may have a few more hours (or days) to move and in the event of a draw, there will be a determination as to who will be considered the winner. Or maybe the tie can be broken by who has won more daily games in the last month or who is prettier or who can write a better sonnet. Okay, I'm kidding about the last few points, but certainly there can be a neat way to break ties.

I really REALLY like the idea of tie break matches. In fact that's what I thought the tie break option was initially. This goes back to a post I made a little bit ago. Why not give tournament managers more control over stuff like this?

Thanks for resurrecting my post Aaron. Hopefully more people can join and help bring these points to fruition.

I also think that tournament managers should have more control over details in the tournaments. For example, I would like to see playoff rounds (of elimination games or matches) in later parts of tournaments rather than just setting up more and more round robins until there are no players left.

But again, there are so many options for tiebreakers that I don't understand why it's limited to just that one system that many times still leaves players tied.

There are plenty of tiebreak options that can be considered, set about in whatever rank might be deemed best:

** Head to head

** Best record against the highest finisher not involved in tie; (continuing this until the bottom of the table or a tie is broken)

** Most points with black

** Most wins

** Most wins with black

** Highest rating

** Highest rating in the last three (or some other arbitrary number of) months

Then we could have an Armaggedon-type tiebreaker match or maybe just break the tie with a random number generator (personally, as bad as this might be, I'd rather use that than to just allow all tied players to advance).