A tournament is a competition Competition is a contest between individuals, groups, nations, animals, etc. for territory, a niche, or a location of resources. It arises whenever two or more parties strive for a goal which cannot be shared. Competition occurs naturally between living organisms which co-exist in the same environment. For example, animals compete over water involving a relatively large number of competitors, all participating in a sport A sport is an organized, competitive, and skillful physical activity requiring commitment and fair play, in which a winner can be defined by objective means. It is governed by a set of rules or customs. In a sport the key factors are the physical capabilities and skills of the competitor when determining the outcome . The physical activity or game A game is a structured activity, usually undertaken for enjoyment and sometimes used as an educational tool. Games are distinct from work, which is usually carried out for remuneration, and from art, which is more concerned with the expression of ideas. However, the distinction is not clear-cut, and many games are also considered to be work or art. More specifically, the term may be used in either of two overlapping senses:

1. One or more competitions held at a single venue and concentrated into a relatively short time interval.
2. A competition involving multiple matches, each involving a subset of the competitors, with the overall tournament winner determined based on the combined results of these individual matches. These are common in those sports and games where each match must involve a small number of competitors: often precisely two, as in most team sports Team sport includes any sport which involves people working together towards a shared objective. Some team sports are practiced between opposing teams, where the players interact directly and simultaneously between them to achieve an objective. The objective generally involves teammates facilitating the movement of a ball or similar item in, racket sports and combat sports A Combat sport, also known as a Combative sport, is a competitive contact sport where two combatants fight against each other using certain rules of engagement , typically with the aim of simulating parts of real hand to hand combat. Boxing, kickboxing, amateur wrestling, puroresu, mixed martial arts and fencing are examples of combat sports, many card games A card game is any game using playing cards as the primary things with which the game is played, be they traditional or game-specific. Countless card games exist, including families of related games . Some games have formally standardized rules, while rules for others can vary by region, culture, and person and board games A board game is a game in which counters or pieces are placed, removed, or moved on a premarked surface or "board" according to a set of rules. Games may be based on pure strategy, chance or a mixture of the two and usually have a goal which a player aims to achieve. Early board games represented a battle between two armies and most, and many forms of competitive debating Debate or debating is a formal method of interactive and representational argument. Debate is a broader form of argument than logical argument, which only examines consistency from axiom, and factual argument, which only examines what is or isn't the case or rhetoric which is a technique of persuasion. Though logical consistency, factual accuracy. Such tournaments allow large numbers to compete against each other in spite of the restriction on numbers in a single match.

These two senses are distinct. All golf tournaments meet the first definition, but while match play tournaments meet the second, stroke play tournaments do not, since there are no distinct matches within the tournament. In contrast, football (soccer) Association football, more commonly known as football or soccer, is a team sport played between two teams of eleven players using a spherical ball. It is widely considered to be the most popular sport in the world leagues like the Premier League The Premier League is an English professional league for association football clubs. At the top of the English football league system, it is the country's primary football competition. Contested by 20 clubs, it operates on a system of promotion and relegation with The Football League. The Premier League is a corporation in which the 20 member are tournaments in the second sense, but not the first, having matches spread across many stadia over a period of up to a year. Many tournaments meet both definitions; for example, the Wimbledon tennis championship The Championships Wimbledon, or simply Wimbledon, is the oldest tennis tournament in the world and is generally considered the most prestigious. It has been held at the All England Club in the London suburb of Wimbledon since 1877. It is one of the four Grand Slam tennis tournaments, and the only one still played on the game's original surface,.

A tournament-match (or tie or fixture or heat) may involve multiple game-matches (or rubbers or legs) between the competitors. For example, in the Davis Cup The Davis Cup is the premier international team event in men's tennis. It is run by the International Tennis Federation and is contested between teams of players from competing countries in a knock-out format. The competition began in 1900 as a challenge between Great Britain and the United States. In 2005, 134 nations entered teams into the tennis Tennis is a sport usually played between two players or between two teams of two players each (doubles). Each player uses a racquet that is strung to strike a hollow rubber ball covered with felt over a net into the opponent's court tournament, a tie between two nations involves five rubbers between the nations' players. The team that wins the most rubbers wins the tie. In the later rounds of UEFA Champions League The UEFA Champions League is an annual association football cup competition organised by UEFA since 1955 for the top football clubs in Europe. The final of the competition is – along with the NFL's Super Bowl – the most watched annual sporting event worldwide, drawing just over 100 million television viewers of football (soccer), each fixture is played over two legs In sport , a two-legged tie is a contest between two teams which comprises two matches or legs, with each team as the home team in one leg. The winning team is usually determined by aggregate score, the sum of the scores of the two legs. For example, if the scores of the two legs are:. The scores of each leg are added, and the team with the higher aggregate score wins the fixture, with away goals The away goals rule is a method of breaking ties in association football and other sports when teams play each other twice, once at each team's home ground. By the away goals rule, the team that has scored more goals "away from home" will win if scores are otherwise tied. This is sometimes expressed by saying that away goals "count used as a tiebreaker and a penalty shootout Penalty shootouts, properly named kicks from the penalty mark, are a method sometimes used to decide which team progresses to the next stage of a tournament following a draw in a game of association football. Kicks during a shootout are governed by different rules from a penalty kick, which are part of normal play during a match if away goals cannot determine a winner.

Knockout tournaments

A knockout tournament is divided into successive rounds; each competitor plays in at most one fixture per round. The top-ranked competitors in each fixture progress to the next round. As rounds progress, the number of competitors and fixtures decreases, and the final round consists of just one fixture, the winner of which is the overall champion.

In a single-elimination tournament A single-elimination tournament, also called a knockout, cup or sudden death tournament, is a type of elimination tournament where the loser of each match is immediately eliminated from winning the championship or first prize in the event, only the top-ranked competitors in a fixture progress; in 2-competitor games, only the winner progresses. All other competitors are eliminated. This ensures a winner is decided with the minimum number of fixtures. However, most competitors will be eliminated after relatively few matches; a single bad or unlucky performance can nullify many preceding excellent ones. Some single-elimination tournaments such as NBA The National Basketball Association is the pre-eminent men's professional basketball league in North America which composes thirty franchised member clubs, of which twenty-nine are located in the United States and one in Canada. It is an active member of USA Basketball (USAB), which is recognized by the International Basketball Federation as the use a multiple-game format, in which teams would play each other more than one game (e.g. best-of-seven series in NBA) in order to determine who is the winner of this round. Other knockout formats provide a "second chance" for some or all losers.

A double-elimination tournament may be used in 2-competitor games to allow each competitor a single loss without being eliminated from the tournament. All losers from the main bracket enter a losers' bracket, the winner of which plays off against the main bracket's winner.

Some formats allow losers to play extra rounds before re-entering the main competition in a later round. Rowing Rowing is a sport in which athletes race against each other on rivers, on lakes or on the ocean, depending upon the type of race and the discipline. The boats are propelled by the reaction forces on the oar blades as they are pushed against the water. The sport can be both recreational, focusing on learning the techniques required, and competitive regattas A regatta is a term used to describe either a boat race, or series of boat races. Although the term typically describes racing events of unpowered water craft, some powerboat race series are also called regattas. Most commonly, a regatta is either a series of rowing, sailing, canoeing, gondola races or yacht racing. A regatta often includes social often have repechage rounds for the "fastest losers" from the heats. The winners of these progress, but are at a disadvantage in later rounds owing to the extra effort expended during the repechage.

In the playoffs of the Australian Football League The Australian Football League is the premier, national Australian rules football competition in Australia. It is the most popular sports competition in Australia when measured by average domestic sport attendances, the teams with the best record before the playoffs are allowed to lose a game without being eliminated, whereas the lesser qualifiers are not. In athletics meetings, fastest losers may progress in a running event held over several rounds; e.g. the qualifiers for a later round might be the first 4 from each of 6 heats, plus the 8 fastest losers from among the remaining runners.

An extreme form of the knockout tournament is the stepladder format where the strongest team (or individual, depending on the sport) is assured of a berth at the final round while the next strongest teams are given byes according to their strength/seeds; for example, in a four team tournament, the fourth and third seed figure in the first round, then the winner goes to the semifinals against the second seed, while the survivor faces the first seed at the final. Three American sports organizations either currently use this format or have in the past:

• For over 30 years (generally from the mid-1960s to 1997), most events on the PBA Tour of ten-pin bowling Ten-pin bowling is a competitive sport in which a player (the “bowler”) rolls a bowling ball down a wooden or synthetic (polyurethane) lane with the objective of scoring points by knocking down as many pins as possible used a stepladder final, usually involving five bowlers.
• Both halves of the bracket in the men's and women's postseason basketball tournaments in the West Coast Conference The West Coast Conference is an NCAA collegiate athletics conference consisting of eight member schools across the states of California, Oregon, and Washington are organized as stepladder tournaments. The bottom four teams play in the first round; the survivors will face the #3 and #4 seeds, and the winners of those matches take on the top two seeds in the semifinals.
• Women's Professional Soccer Women's Professional Soccer is the top level professional women's soccer league in the United States that began play on March 29, 2009. The league replaced the Women's United Soccer Association (WUSA), which folded after the 2003 season. The league is composed of 8 teams, with plans for future expansion. The WPS is the highest level in the United has used this format since its inaugural 2009 season. For an example of its playoff system, see 2009 Women's Professional Soccer Playoffs.

Group tournaments

A group tournament, league A league system is a hierarchy of leagues in a sport that usually teams can be promoted or relegated between, depending on finishing positions or playoffs. They are often called pyramids due to their tendency to have more divisions at the bottom. League systems are used in a number of sports, especially association football, rugby league and rugby, division It is often part of a league system, which is a set of divisions, in which teams can move between differently ranked divisions. Divisions are then organised in such a way that teams or players in any given division are comparably adept at their chosen sport, so that matches are more even, and therefore more exciting. Often this is achieved by or conference A conference is a group of teams that regularly schedule games against each other. Conferences often, but not always, include teams from a common geographic region. Large conferences can be split into divisions involves all competitors playing a number of fixtures. Points are awarded for each fixture, with competitors ranked based either on total number of points or average points per fixture. Usually each competitor plays an equal number of fixtures, in which case rankings by total points and by average points are equivalent. The English County Championship The County Championship is the domestic first-class cricket competition in England and Wales. All but one of the teams are named after, and were originally representatives of, historic English counties, the exception being Glamorgan, which is a Welsh county in cricket did not require an equal number of matches prior to 1963.^[1]

In a round-robin tournament A round-robin tournament or all-play-all tournament is a type of tournament "in which each contestant meets all other contestants in turn". In a single round-robin schedule, each participant plays every other participant once. If each participant plays all others twice, this is frequently called a double round-robin. The term is rarely, each competitor plays all the others an equal number of times, once in a single round-robin tournament and twice in a double round-robin tournament. This is often seen as producing the most reliable rankings. However, for large numbers of competitors it may require an unfeasibly large number of rounds. A Swiss system tournament attempts to determine a winner reliably, based on a smaller number of fixtures. Fixtures are scheduled one round at a time; a competitor will play another who has a similar record in previous rounds of the tournament. This allows the top (and bottom) competitors to be determined with fewer rounds than a round-robin, though the middle rankings are unreliable.

There may be other considerations besides reliability of rankings. In some professional Professional sports, as opposed to amateur sports, are sports in which athletes receive payment for their performance. Professional athleticism has come to the fore through a combination of developments. Mass media and increased leisure have brought larger audiences, so that sports organizations or teams can command large incomes. As a result, team sports, weaker teams are given an easier slate of fixtures as a form of handicapping Handicapping, in sport and games, is the practice of assigning advantage through scoring compensation or other advantage given to different contestants to equalize the chances of winning. The word also applies to the various methods by which the advantage is calculated. In principle, a more experienced player is disadvantaged in order to make it. Sometimes schedules are weighted in favour of local derbies or other traditional rivalries. For example, NFL teams play two games against each of the other three teams in their division, one game against half of the other twelve teams in their conference, and one game against a quarter of the sixteen teams in the other conference.

American sports are also unusual in providing fixtures between competitors who are, for ranking purposes, in different groups. Another, systematic, example of this was the 2006 Women's Rugby World Cup: each of the teams in Group A played each of the teams in Group B, with the groups ranked separately based on the results. (Groups C and D intertwined similarly.) An elaboration of this system is the Mitchell movement in duplicate bridge, discussed below, where North-South pairs play East-West pairs.

In 2-competitor games where ties To tie or draw is to finish a competition with identical or inconclusive results. The word "tie" is usually used in North America for sports such as American football. "Draw" is usually used in the United Kingdom and the Commonwealth of Nations and it is usually used for sports such as Football (soccer) and Australian rules are rare or impossible, competitors are typically ranked by number of wins, with ties counting half; each competitors' listings are usually ordered Wins–Losses(–Ties). Where draws are more common, this may be 2 points for a win and 1 for a draw, which is mathematically equivalent but avoids having too many half-points in the listings. These are usually ordered Wins–Draws–Losses. If there are more than two competitors per fixture, points may be ordinal (for example, 3 for first, 2 for second, 1 for third).

Multi-stage tournaments

Many tournaments are held in multiple stages, with the top teams in one stage progressing to the next. American professional team sports have a "regular season" (group tournament) acting as qualification for the "post season" or "playoffs The playoffs, postseason, or finals of a sports league are a game or series of games played after the regular season by the top competitors, to determine the league champion or a similar accolade. The term and concept are most widespread in North America" (single-elimination tournament). In the FIFA World Cup The FIFA World Cup, occasionally called the Football World Cup or Soccer World Cup, but usually referred to simply as the World Cup, is an international association football competition contested by the men's national teams of the members of Fédération Internationale de Football Association , the sport's global governing body. The championship, each continent has one or more qualifying tournaments, some of which are themselves multi-stage. The top teams in each qualify for the finals tournament. There, the 32 teams are divided into eight round-robin groups of four, with the top two in each progressing to the knockout phase, which involves four single-elimination rounds including the final.

Sometimes, results from an earlier phase are carried over into a later phase. In the Cricket World Cup The Cricket World Cup is the premier international championship of men's One Day International cricket. The event is organised by the sport's governing body, the International Cricket Council (ICC), with preliminary qualification rounds leading up to a finals tournament which is held every four years. The tournament is the world's fourth largest, the second stage, known as the Super Eight since 2007 The 2007 ICC Cricket World Cup was the ninth edition of the tournament and took place in the West Indies from 13 March to 28 April 2007, using the sport's One Day International format. There were a total of 51 matches played, three fewer than at the 2003 World Cup and before that the Super Six, features two teams from each of four preliminary groups (previously three teams from two preliminary groups), who do not replay the teams they have already played, but instead reuse the original results in the new league table. Formerly in the Swiss Football League Categories: Swiss Football League | Swiss football competitions | Football league systems , teams played a double round-robin, at which point they were split into a top "championship" group and a bottom "relegation" group; each played a separate double round-robin, with results of all 32 matches counting for ranking each group. A similar system is also used in the Scottish Premier League The Scottish Premier League is a professional league competition for football clubs located at the top level of the Scottish football league system, above the Scottish Football League since 2000. After 33 games, when every club has played every other club three times, the division is split into two halves. Clubs play a further 5 matches, against the teams in their half of the division. This can (and often does) result in the team placed 7th having a higher points total than the team placed 6th, because their final 5 games are considerably easier.

The top Slovenian basketball league has a unique system. In its first phase, 12 of the league's 13 clubs compete in a full home-and-away season, with the country's representative in the Euroleague Euroleague Basketball, known for sponsorship reasons as Turkish Airlines Euroleague Basketball and commonly known simply as the Euroleague , is the highest level and most important professional basketball competition in Europe, with teams from up to 18 different European countries. The competition is operated by ULEB, a Europe-wide consortium of (an elite pan-European club competition) exempt. The league then splits. The top seven teams are joined by the Euroleague representative for a second home-and-away season, with no results carrying over from the first phase. These eight teams compete for four spots in a final playoff. The bottom five teams play their own home-and-away league, but their previous results do carry over. These teams are competing to avoid relegation, with the bottom team automatically relegated and the second-from-bottom team forced to play a mini-league with the second- and third-place teams from the second level for a place in the top league.

Promotion and relegation

Where the number of competitors is larger than a tournament format permits, there may be multiple tournaments held in parallel, with competitors assigned to a particular tournament based on their ranking. In chess Chess is a board game involving two players. It is played on a chessboard, a square-checkered board with 64 squares arranged in an eight-by-eight grid. At the beginning of the game each player controls sixteen pieces: one king, one queen, two rooks, two knights, two bishops, and eight pawns. The object of the game is to checkmate the opponent's, Scrabble Scrabble is a word game in which two to four players score points by forming words from individual lettered tiles on a game board marked with a 15-by-15 grid. The words are formed across and down in crossword fashion and must appear in a standard dictionary. Official reference works provide a list of permissible words. The Collins Scrabble checker, and many other individual games, many tournaments over one or more years contribute to a player's ranking. However, many team sports involve teams in only one major tournament per year. In European sport, including football, this constitutes the sole ranking for the following season; the top teams from each division of the league are promoted to a higher division, while the bottom teams from a higher division are relegated to a lower one.

This promotion and relegation occurs mainly in league tournaments, but also features in Davis Cup and Fed Cup tennis:

• In the Davis Cup:
  • The first-round losers in the top-level World Group compete in playoff ties against the winners of the second-round ties in Group I of the competition's three regional zones, with the winners of each playoff tie remaining in or promoted to the World Group.
  • In the three regional zones, Group II is conducted in a knockout format. The winner of the knockout tournament is promoted to Group I of its zone. The first-round losers then play relegation ties, with the losers relegated to Group III.
  • Groups III and IV in each zone are contested in a round-robin format. The top two teams in each group are promoted, while the bottom two teams are relegated (assuming there is a lower group in their zone).
• In the Fed Cup:
  • The four first-round losers in World Group I compete in playoff ties against the four winners in World Group II, with the winners remaining in or promoted to World Group I.
  • The losers in World Group II play ties against the four zonal Group I winners (two from Europe/Africa and one each from Asia/Oceania and Americas), with the winners playing in World Group II the following season.
  • Groups I and II in all zones, plus Group III in the Europe/Africa Zone only, are conducted in a round-robin format. The bottom two teams in each group are relegated to the next group down, assuming one exists, while the top two teams in Groups II and III are promoted to the next-higher group.

The hierarchy of divisions may be linear, or tree-like, as with the English football league pyramid The English football league system, also known as the football pyramid, is a series of interconnected leagues for club football in England . The system has a hierarchical format with promotion and relegation between leagues at different levels, allowing even the smallest club the possibility of ultimately rising to the very top of the system.

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