Essential for real-life games, very useful for multiplayer games (more so for MMO games - at least from the designers point of view), they are often found in single player computer games too. This thread is for discussing the various uses, pros and cons of different tournament methods, including the number of players, the number of played games, the accuracy of the final rankings, the practicalities of organizing the tournaments in the online environment and so forth. For instance, my next game will be a business simulation of a military starships manufacturing galactic company. After each game turn, there will be tournaments (very similar with the F1 tournaments actually) that decide the fame and worth of different ship designs through direct combat one on one combat. Because I want to keep the number of average fights per turn very limited, I use the bubble-sort method: the competing companies have a certain rank at the tournaments start. The two ships lowest in this rank fight, the winner fights against the next ship in the rank, and so on until the top. The player will likely only fight twice each turn, against the slightly worse and the slightly better ships in the rank (and win against the lower and lose against the higher - to keep his place in the list). Even better, the player is guaranteed to only lose once in each tournament. A problem with this tournament type is that if a very good ship enters at the lowest place in the ranking, it will simply defeat every other ship and go straight to the top, without giving the other ships a chance to prove their worth compared to less advanced ships. I don''t think this drawback will be important: as in bubble sort, the ranking is most of the time fairly well sorted, and this problem doesn''t come up very often either. It will probably help to sort the ships by their worth at the start of the game though.