Seeding

Seeding is the act of manually arranging players in a tournament bracket, usually to equalize all sides of the bracket in terms of skill, and so that the best players do not face each other until later rounds. Seeding is used so that players will usually receive placements proportionate to their skill levels. The name comes from the fact that a seed may either grow into the top-notch plant (i.e. the best player) or wither away (i.e. elimination).

Overview

An example of a perfectly seeded bracket.

While organizing a bracket randomly with no manual intervention is technically perfectly fair, this method can be problematic. As the only factor that effects the bracket is chance, there is a probability that players who should not realistically be playing each other end up playing each other, with this probability only increasing as the amount of players in the bracket increases. This usually results in the best players in the tournament playing each other early on, meaning someone who could have won the tournament is instead eliminated while those of lower skill have an easier time and advance farther than they would have otherwise. This problem is exacerbated for pools, as there is the chance that all the best players are put into the same pool, making the other pools much easier to survive. Manual seeding is used to avoid these situations by spreading the best players apart and ensuring they do not encounter each other until later rounds while eliminating less skilled players in the process. While not necessarily fair, this method provides a more accurate outcome relative to skill level.

An example of a perfectly seeded bracket is the graphic to the right. In this 8-player bracket, the best player, #1, competes with the worst player, #8. #2 competes with #7, #3 competes with #6, and #4 competes with #5. By seeding in this fashion, #1 and #2 will only face each other in the final round and will likely get 1st and 2nd place respectively, and lower-level players, having been eliminated by better players, will likely receive lower placements. If the bracket was not seeded properly, the best player, #1, could beat the second best player, #2, in the first round, and lower-level players would be able to advance farther due to weaker opponents being faced. In this situation, a weaker player could receive a higher placement than player #2.

One form of seeding, especially for larger tournaments, is to use many small round-robin pools. In a round-robin pool, players are ranked within their pool and seeded into the bracket, with their first-round bracket match being against a higher/lower-ranked player from another pool to balance skill levels in each section of the bracket. For example, in a tournament using round-robin pools, the top 2 players advance to the bracket. A player who places 1st in their pool will be paired up against a player who placed 2nd in another pool, and vice versa.

Super Smash Bros. 4 and Super Smash Bros. Ultimate have online modes that perform a version of seeding on a grand scale. Global Smash Power is utilized to affect a form of skill based matchmaking where each win raises GSP by a certain amount and each loss lowers GSP by a certain amount. The game then uses this data to determine the best player currently online to match with relative to skill level, effectively seeding every player currently playing online.