The Block Transition Tournament

The Block Transition Tournament is a new form of tournament I developed as an extension to my rating system. It is quite flexible and powerful.

I don’t have it quite ready to publish on Amazon in a book yet, but I do have it in a form that is stored in Google’s cloud:

BlockTransitionTournamentFullPaper.pdf

This tournament design can do a number of very nice things.

1. You can have the top two performers meet up in the final round or final three rounds to play for all the marbles. This can happen every time. With Swisses and Round Robins, this might only ever happen once in a blue moon.
2. You can keep the top players from playing each other until the end or even not to meet at all. It is the organizer’s choice. You can use 6-Blocks for, say, three phases. This yields a 15 game tournament. The first two phases, you can seed the blocks with the Even Distribution Method. This keeps the top three players apart. The final phase (the last five games), you put all the top 6 players in there. It would be quite intense. You also have the player swap rule in effect: If a player from a lower block exceeds…