As someone who’s been running tournaments for a long time, and now does so professionally for Major League Gaming, I’d like to say that the topic creator is completely wrong.
Your Argument:
The Japanese are better than Americans overall in fighting games. The Japanese use single elimination tournaments, whereas American’s use double elim. So therefore, single elimination will make you a better fighting game player.
My Response:
The Japanese are better than Americans overall in fighing games. The Japanese also like video games about dating and sex. Therefore, having an interest in dating/sex video games will make you a better fighting game player.
Your arugment doesn’t logically follow. There’s probably 1000 contributing factors to the Japanese tending to dominate the competitive field of fighting games. Using their superiority at fighting games as proof that single elimination is better is ridiculous. They aren’t necessarily related. The Japanese are probably better because their culture makes them more likely to play fighting games than American culture is and so there are more players in a smaller space all competing constantly. American fighting games communities are smaller and more spread out… sorta like Americans and shooting games.
… that’s a FAR more likely explanation…
As for single elim itself, it doesn’t really do a fair job at measuring overall rankings. If two strong players happen to be seeded near each other for some reason then one of the two of them will probably be eliminated earlier than they really should in comparison to the overall rankings. Other, weaker players might have an easier bracket and advance entirely too far considering their skill. Even with Round Robin or previous tournament results used for seeding, this sort of thing can happen.
Not to mention the fact that certain characters have bad matchups, and certain players have bad matchups as well. You may run into a character/player who’s style perfectly destroy yours by some random twist of the game. In single elimination, if that happened to be your first round match, then you would be eliminated, with no opportunity to learn from your match or battle back into a solid final rank. Double elimination means that all those other guys who had easier early round brackets or who happened to have a style/character who stomped on their early-round opponents will actually have to win more than a fluke/good matchup once or twice to finish high. Essentially, double elim reduces the effect of character matchups and playing styles. It gives you more accurate final results, if not perfect ones.
And on the contrary to the topic starter’s point about character usage, single elimination tournaments actually reduces the variety of tournament characters played. People are more likely to go with their “safe” top tier characters than try their other, developing characters. With less room for error, no one wants to exit early cause they wanted to test their low tiers.
That too, means that double elimination allows for better overall character development. Players actually TEST those questionable characters in the most intense tournament competitions and really get to see if those new tricks and tactics they’ve been developing are optimal strategies. Otherwise they’ll focus on the same old, tried and true methods to grind out victories and eek out one more place up the rankings.
In short, you’re dead wrong.
EDIT: Where the frick is you poll option for “I wouldn’t play in a single elim tournament (because they suck)” cause right now there’s no response that I’m willing to use.