Comparing Draws for Single Elimination Tournaments

Tournaments are used to select a single winner from a group of participants in a sporting event or a paired-comparison experiment. This study compares different draws, or pairings, of teams in single-elimination tournaments under a set of relatively nonrestricting assumptions about the participating teams' pairwise probabilities of winning. We analyze and compare draws for four-team tournaments using various criteria, then attempt to generalize the results to eight-team tournaments. For example, only one-four team draw maximizes the probability that the best team wins for all pairwise probabilities, whereas eight draws are possibly optimal for eight-team tournaments.