Editing Tournament (section)

==General requirements for tournaments==

The primary objective of a tournament is to determine the winner of a competition. Ideally, the tournament should be designed in such a way that all participants have an equal chance to compete and progress, regardless of factors like seeding or scheduling. The influence of luck or chance on the results should be minimised. The tournament should also be an exciting and engaging event for participants and spectators. Hence the following requirements for an ideal tournament:

* The tournament should determine the actually best competitor as the competition winner with the greatest possible probability. The final rankings should also reflect the true strength of the competitors as accurately as possible. (For example, the round-robin tournament is significantly better than the single-elimination tournament in these respects).  

* The tournament should ensure the decisive importance of each match for the final ranking. Meaningless matches for one or both participants, tactical results, collusion at the expense of third parties should be excluded by the rules of the tournament. (This is always fulfilled in the single-elimination tournament, but usually not in the last rounds of the round-robin tournament).

* Other general framework conditions should also be as equal as possible for all competitors. For example, all competitors should have approximately the same regeneration time between matches. As a consequence, both participants playing a match should, as a rule, have played the same number of matches in the tournament so far. (Not fulfilled in the double-elimination tournament)

* Tiebreak criteria should be transparent and based on sporting merit only. (Problematic in the round-robin tournament and in the Swiss system tournament)

* For the spectators, exciting matches between the best pretenders to the championship are desirable. Therefore, the proportion of such games should be as high as possible.

* The winner of the competition is to be determined at the end of the tournament in a final of the two best competitors.

* The tournament should correspond to the sport-specific, organisational and temporal framework conditions of the specific competition, e.g. competition duration, minimum and maximum number of matches in total and individually for each competitor, etc.