Elimination Tournament

Of all possible tournament types, this one is probably the most-frequently used.

You start out with a number of wrestlers which is usually a power of 2 - so four, eight, sixteen, thirty-two and so on. Wrestlers are paired up. The winners advance, the losers are out of the tournament. This continues until only one wrestler remains.

The top entrants can easily be kept away from each other until late in the tournament, and since half the wrestlers get eliminated in every round, the Singles Elimination Tournament is quick.

The major downside is that you're done if you lose once or have a draw.

Round Robin Tournament

Every wrestler faces every other wrestler and gets points based on whether he wins, loses or draws. This ensures a level playing field and that one bad showing isn't going to eliminate you from the tournament.

The downside is that as the field of competitors increases, the number of matches to be wrestled quickly spirals out of control. Where a four-man Round Robin consists of only three rounds and six matches total, an eight-man Round Robin consists of seven rounds and 28 matches.

A 16-man Round Robin will keep you in front of the computer for a while with its 120 bouts.

Swiss Rules Tournament

This tournament type combines aspects of a Round Robin and an Elimination Tournament and is perfect for large tournaments. Wrestlers are paired up randomly in the first round and receive points for winning.

In all further rounds of Phase 1, wrestlers with a similar score are paired up with the only caveat being that you can only wrestle every opponent once.

After a few rounds, the top x competitors move on to an Elimination Tournament where the wrestlers are bracketed in a way where the top finisher of Phase 1 can't wrestle the runner-up until the finals.

The one drawback of Swiss Rules Tournaments is that losing early puts you at a competitive disadvantage because in the event of two wrestlers ending up with the same number of points, the wrestler whose opponents did best in the tournament will advance. Losing early puts you in with others who lost meaning your opponents' relative strength suffers.

Multi-Phase Tournaments

Swiss Rules Tournaments consist of two phases but so can Round Robin Tournaments. If you wish, you can schedule a Round Robin with multiple blocks where the winners (and possibly runners-up) advance to Phase 2 which can either be an Elimination Tournament or another Round Robin.

A popular annual tradition which makes use of this system is New Japan Pro Wrestling's G1 Tournament where you have two blocks of wrestlers and the block winners meet in a final, a shortened Elimination Tournament.

Elimination Tournament Options

When creating an Elimination Tournament, you can instruct the program to have the wrestlers be bracketed in the order you selected which is the default. However you can also treat your selections as if they were ranked in order with the tournament favorite being selected first, the potential runner-up being selected second and so on.

In this case you have option of telling the program to bracket them accordingly which means #1 and #2 will start at the opposite ends of the bracket. The rest of the bracket will be balanced according to international standards.

Or the program can bracket the selected wrestlers randomly which means you will be getting a different first round bracket every time you run this tournament.

Additionally you can take control of how the next rounds are bracketed and have the winners of the last round be re-bracketed according to their seed number. And in case of a bye, this is big because the favorites will be the ones who then get to advance without a match. Or if you prefer to mix things up, you can have the brackets be determined randomly.

And have I mentioned that you could have losers advance instead of winners? It's up to you.

Round Robin Tournament Options

You can assign different point values for wins and draws to create you own tournament model. Not awarding any points for draws changes tournament strategy tremendously because competitors will have to win or they will have lost.

You can take this one step further if you want and award different points for finish types, for instance making a pinfall win worth more than a disqualification win or a submission win more than both. And if you really want to make things interesting, you can do the same for different types of losses. Imagine awarding negative points for losing by pin or submission. It adds another level to tournament strategy.

In case you schedule an Elimination Tournament as Phase 2, all the options mentioned above will be available for this as well.

Swiss Rules Tournament Options

Since the first phase of a Swiss Rules tournament has a Round Robinesque setup, the points made about scoring different outcomes in different ways apply here as well.

Aside from this the well-defined ruleset for this type of tournament leaves little room for different options. The pairing of the wrestlers follows an international standard, as does the decision of how many rounds to run in Phase 1 as well as how many competitors are allowed to advance to Phase 2. Even the rules for tie-breaking are completely unambiguous.