Namely in fighting games, I’ve noticed that bracket seeding is often determined prior to the tournament through rankings — but, why not let it be randomized? What difference does a seeded and non seeded tournament make?
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Seeded tournaments are set up so that, should all the favorites win, the top four teams will meet in the semifinals.
Of course upsets can happen, but in many competitive events history has shown us that the lowest seed is highly unlikely to upset the top seed.
In the notoriously top-upset-prone NHL, the lowest 8 seed wins around 1/4th of the first round matchups against number 1.
In the notoriously *not* top-upset-prone NCAA tournament the number 1 seed has only lost once in the first round, in 144 attempts.
So you can see that seeding doesn’t mean much in the NHL – the “worst” playoff team isn’t that much worse than the “best” and can routinely win, or at least produce a good showing.
Conversely, seeding the tournament is critical in the NCAA tournament – the best teams trounce the worst more than 99% of the time, and you’d hate to have such a pointless matchup occur several rounds in after much better teams have been eliminated.
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