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Comment by incision | Hacker News Reader

"Teams blamed the introduction of a round-robin stage rather than a straight knockout tournament as the main cause of the problem. The round-robin format can allow results to be manipulated to earn an easier matchup in the knockout round."

Well there you have it.

Unless there's some fantastic explanation for the value of a round-robin stage, it's pretty clear...

The organizers screwed up and someone has decided to penalize the players for adapting to the organizer's stupidity.

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The value of the round-robin stage is to establish team rankings before the single-elimination stage.

You have some alternatives, but no silver bullets:

* Establish rank before the tournament (in which case you're just moving the problem)

* Eliminate rank and seed teams randomly (which makes it much less likely to see the best teams medal)

* Use random seeding and a double-elimination structure (as a fan, I dislike double-elimination, but I'm not sure what the consensus is on this)

* Try to mitigate the problem by playing matches consecutively (you'll need lots of courts), hiding the actual seeding until the single-elimination round (people will assume you're corrupt), or other creative methods (you probably won't catch all the edge cases, so throw in a rule that says "you must try your hardest")

A round-robin stage is fine as long as all final matches are played simultaneously (as is the case for most football/soccer group stages). That wasn't the case this time.

There can still be issues even with that. I watched an international youth tournament (CONCACAF u20 championships, I think) where the US and Canada? could each guarantee advancement with a tie, but could be eliminated if they lost. The first half had both teams trying a bit, but not being willing to push enough men forward to have a real chance. The second half was a joke, with the US midfield and defense kicking the ball around their own half for 20+ minutes at the end of the game, while the opponent stayed in their own half.

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