Elimination format notebook

What follows is a lot of dabbling over tournament brackets for elimination formats based on voting criteria, either competitive or creative. Specifically, it's the ways I can do the semi-final bracket of my story contests. Formats for contests with more than two rounds of competition will be in a future article.

This assumes that there will be 20 entries that will go through all in all.

Normally, the criteria will be purely point-based. The highest scoring entries qualify with a threshold of n entries for each semi, however it will be divided.

There are other ways to pick the qualifiers that don't involve raw points, of course. In this case, there are still three main voting parts: entrants, juries and public poll, not all three necessarily included.

Entrants vote amongst themselves, restricted to vote on the entries in the semi-final they're assigned to.

The poll is open, and consists of ballots where voters are asked to vote for a number of entries.

Juries consist of at least three people who aren't participating and they will rank entries.

The usual selection pattern is entrant-poll-jury, but need not be strictly followed, as in not only switching order but in using processes that combine everything into one final result.

As multiple entries will advance, any voting system that can only handle a single winner is not viable, but any system that can at handle multiple winners or have its results be translated into a final ranking can work.

Practically all semi-finals happen at the same time, but can be split into multiple blocks, most tenable being one or two.

One semi

If you plan on just clumping ever semi-finalist into one round, you better have some ways to keep it from having too many entries to vote on.

One way to reduce the amount of entries needed to vote on is to use a seeding system, which can also reduce the total amount of entries that will go through.

In the case of cramming everyone in one semi-final, the format has to change to reduce the work for ranking voters. The best way to do this is to reduce the amount of entries they will vote on to one while slightly increasing the power of said votes. 

What can happen is given a number of entries that will qualify, each voting sector will be responsible for a portion of qualifiers. This means that entries will qualify solely by the decision of one voting sector

It is still better to split the load so that the voters involved won't have to deal with a lot of entries to rank.

Two semis

The current format is as follows:

1. The highest eight entries from the entrant votes, then from the remaining

2. The highest entry from the public poll, and from what's left

3. The choice of the jury.

This jury choice can be between the whole of what's left, or based on between the two entries of either sector that almost qualified, or between the almost qualifier of either the entrants or the poll

The voting can be similar to the final, with the top ten scores total qualifying in each semi. The voting in the final is the scores of the entrants, a separate jury vote, and the points of the public equal to the total points of the entrants who voted, distributed based on proportion of votes received by each entry.

Or the total votes of each sector will be reduced to a final ranking, and the ten highest ranked total from the three sectors will qualify

Contingency plans

In case one of these sectors can't vote along can't vote along, and you only have two aspects left, the structure will have to change dramatically.

When one sector isn't working, these formats will work whichever of the two are working:

- Each will pick its five qualifiers, one before the other to avoid overlap

- One sector will pick its top nine while the other will pick from the remaining entries

- One sector will pick its top nine while the other will pick between the the other's 10th or 11th

- The votes of each sector will be converted as rank, combined and the top ten chosen

If there aren't enough entrants who voted:

- Individual judge ranks are added along with the converted poll ranking

In case of poll votes spoiling:

- The entrants' votes are added with the jury vote converted as an extra entrant vote

When the judges aren't judgemental enough:

- Entrant vote scores and the raw poll scores are added 

- Entrant vote scores and the proportionally converted poll scored are added

Multiple semis

This is a format more fitting for shows with an episode quota, but here we go anyway. These usually involve the whole lot of entries divided evenly then the number qualifying will depend, optionally involving a wildcard of sorts.  

Practically a reduced version of each of the formats used for two semi-finals can fit multiple ones. Voting systems that only handle one winner will be more useful in this case, e.g. using Condorcet voting. Each semi will have to have more than one qualifier, so the voting will either be capable of multiple winners or use a compound or hybrid.

In lieu of an arbitrary wildcard, a separate wildcard round is usually added. This is practically another voting round, but the formats of these can be different. In the context of this essay, semi-finals with wildcard rounds need to have a voting format that will acommodate one round of voting. E.g. the poll has to sit until the wildcards.