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57-710: Originally, the ITF Men's Circuit consisted of satellite tournaments , each of which took place over four weeks. However, in the late 1990s, the ITF introduced Futures tournaments , allowing for greater flexibility in the organization of the tournaments for national associations, and participation in tournaments for players. Over time, the ratio of Futures tournaments to satellites increased until 2007, when satellites were eliminated. Futures tournaments allow for players to win career titles and improve their rankings. Futures are held in both singles and doubles and last one week. As of 2017,

114-434: A penalty shoot-out used if the scores are level after both matches conclude. In this case, the first tiebreak-match is extra time (modified game-match with reduced duration) and the second tiebreak-match is a penalty shoot-out. A knockout tournament or elimination tournament is divided into successive rounds; each competitor plays in at least one fixture per round. The top-ranked competitors in each fixture progress to

171-409: A round-robin tournament , each competitor plays all the others an equal number of times, once in a single round-robin tournament and twice in a double round-robin tournament. This is often seen as producing the most reliable rankings. However, for large numbers of competitors it may require an unfeasibly large number of rounds. A Swiss system tournament attempts to determine a winner reliably, based on

228-428: A single-elimination tournament . This format is common in many international team events, such as World Cups or Olympic tournaments. Some tournaments have two group stages, for example the 1982 FIFA World Cup or the 1999–2000 UEFA Champions League . As well as a fixed number of qualifiers from each group, some may be determined by comparing between different groups: at the 1986 FIFA World Cup and UEFA Euro 2016 ,

285-427: A "tournament" is a tournament in the first sense above, composed of multiple "events", which are tournaments in the second sense. Some events may be single-elimination, double-elimination, or Swiss style. However, " Pair events " are the most widespread. In these events, a number of deals (or boards ) are each played several times by different players. For each such board the score achieved by each north–south (NS) pair

342-416: A Swiss System for UEFA Champions League , the second matchday in the first stage (today's Groups Stage) would depend on the results of the first matchday of the same stage, the third matchday would depend on the results of both the first and the second matchday, and so on, in contrast to the predetermination of all Groups Stage fixtures upon the initial draw. Another tournament system that attempts to reduce

399-413: A final playoff. The bottom five teams play their own home-and-away league, but their previous results do carry over. These teams are competing to avoid relegation, with the bottom team automatically relegated and the second-from-bottom team forced to play a mini-league with the second- and third-place teams from the second level for a place in the top league. Where the number of competitors is larger than

456-556: A fixture is one name for a tournament-match that determines who, out of two or three or more, will advance; a fixture may consist of one or more game-matches between competitors). Points are awarded for each fixture, with competitors ranked based either on total number of points or average points per fixture. Usually each competitor plays an equal number of fixtures, in which case rankings by total points and by average points are equivalent. The English County Championship in cricket did not require an equal number of matches prior to 1963. In

513-407: A four team tournament, the fourth and third seed figure in the first round, then the winner goes to the semifinals against the second seed, while the survivor faces the first seed at the final. Four American sports organizations either currently use this format, or have in the past: A group tournament, league , division or conference involves all competitors playing a number of fixtures (again,

570-409: A losers' bracket, the winner of which plays off against the main bracket's winner. A triple-elimination tournament allows a competitor to lose two games and creates a third bracket or fourth bracket which are usually followed by a playoff. It is commonly used in curling tournaments. Some elimination tournaments are in a best-of- n series , requiring a competitor to lose a majority of n games (in

627-476: A multi-stage tournament. The competitors are divided into multiple groups, which play separate round-robins in parallel. Measured by a points-based ranking system , the top competitors in each group qualify for the next stage. In most editions of the FIFA World Cup finals tournament, the first round has been a group stage with groups of four teams, the top two qualifying for the "knockout stage" played as

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684-455: A running event held over several rounds; e.g. the qualifiers for a later round might be the first 4 from each of 6 heats, plus the 8 fastest losers from among the remaining runners. An extreme form of the knockout tournament is the stepladder format where the strongest team (or individual, depending on the sport) is assured of a berth at the final round while the next strongest teams are given byes according to their strength/seeds; for example, in

741-401: A satellite tournament. A satellite tournament in pinball is modeled after those in poker . It is a smaller tournament that leads up to a major pinball championship, where participants have the opportunity to win their entry into the larger tournament. Applying the satellite tournament concept to pinball was first done by Northwest Pinball and Arcade Show in 2013 to promote both the show and

798-423: A series against the same opponent) before being eliminated (e.g. in a best-of-7 games series, the winner must win 4 games). Some formats use a repechage , allowing losers to play extra rounds before re-entering the main competition in a later round. Rowing regattas often have repechage rounds for the "fastest loser" from the heats. The winners of these progress, but are at a disadvantage in later rounds owing to

855-449: A smaller number of fixtures. Unlike regular Groups format, fixtures are scheduled one round at a time and depending on the results of the previous one; a competitor will play another who has a similar record in previous rounds of the tournament. This allows the top (and bottom) competitors to be determined with fewer rounds than a round-robin, though the middle rankings are unreliable. For clarification, this means in hypothesis UEFA adopts

912-647: A system, such as the AFL and the National Rugby League in rugby league. The A-League of association football also used such a system through its 2011–12 season, but now uses a pure knockout playoff. Similar systems are used in cricket's Indian Premier League and most curling tournaments, and were also used by the Super League of European rugby league before being scrapped after the 2014 season. In athletics meetings, fastest losers may progress in

969-629: A team in the bottom half never receives a higher final ranking than a team which qualified for the top half. A multi-stage pool system was implemented by Curling Canada for the Canadian championship curling tournaments (the Scotties Tournament of Hearts for women and the Montana's Brier for men) starting in 2018. The change was intended to allow the expansion of the main stage of the tournament from twelve to sixteen teams while keeping

1026-423: A tournament format permits, there may be multiple tournaments held in parallel, with competitors assigned to a particular tournament based on their ranking. In Chess , Scrabble , and many other individual games, many tournaments over one or more years contribute to a player's ranking. However, many team sports involve teams in only one major tournament per year. In European sport, including football, this constitutes

1083-400: A tournament is to determine the winner of a competition. Ideally, the tournament should be designed in such a way that all participants have an equal chance to compete and progress, regardless of factors like seeding or scheduling. The influence of luck or chance on the results should be minimised. The tournament should also be an exciting and engaging event for participants and spectators. Hence

1140-543: A unique system. In its first phase, 12 of the league's 13 clubs compete in a full home-and-away season, with the country's representative in the Euroleague (an elite pan-European club competition) exempt. The league then splits. The top seven teams are joined by the Euroleague representative for a second home-and-away season, with no results carrying over from the first phase. These eight teams compete for four spots in

1197-421: A win and 1 for a tie, which is mathematically equivalent but avoids having too many half-points in the listings, or 3 points for a win and 1 for a tie , which de-emphasizes ties in favor of playing to a decisive result. These are usually ordered Wins–Ties–Losses. If there are more than two competitors per fixture, points may be ordinal (for example, 3 for first, 2 for second, 1 for third). The primary objective of

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1254-406: A winner is decided with the minimum number of fixtures. However, most competitors will be eliminated after relatively few matches; a single bad or unlucky performance can nullify many preceding excellent ones. A double-elimination tournament may be used in 2-competitor games to allow each competitor a single loss without being eliminated from the tournament. All losers from the main bracket enter

1311-508: Is American English , derived from the resemblance of the links in the tree diagram to the bracket punctuation symbol ] or [ (called a "square bracket" in British English ). The closest British term is draw , although this implies an element of chance, whereas some brackets are determined entirely by seeding . In some tournaments, the full bracket is determined before the first match. In such cases, fans may enjoy trying to predict

1368-452: Is a competition involving at least three competitors, all participating in a sport or game . More specifically, the term may be used in either of two overlapping senses: These two senses are distinct. All golf tournaments meet the first definition, but while match play tournaments meet the second, stroke play tournaments do not, since there are no distinct matches within the tournament. In contrast, association football leagues like

1425-537: Is a qualifying event. Winners of these satellites usually win the buy-in fee to a larger, more prestigious tournament like the World Series of Poker Main Event. Although there are some land-based satellite tournaments (usually for very high-stakes tournaments), most of them are online-based . Some sites, like PokerStars , maintain several tiers of satellites. A player can thus start out at one tier (not necessarily

1482-455: Is divided into divisions, usually by region. In the post-season tournament, only the teams with the best records qualify, except the division winner (and also #2 and #3 in the division in the NHL) having an automatic entry into the tournament. Some North American professional post-season tournaments are single-elimination format. If a bye is required, the top seeded teams usually get the bye. There

1539-474: Is organized according to a team's seeding ; higher-seeded teams are matched against lower-seeded teams. Teams that qualify for the post-season tournament only compete against teams in their own conference, until only one team from each conference remains. These two teams, called the conference champions, play each other to determine the best in the league. Other leagues, like the NHL, have two conferences, each of which

1596-453: Is then measured against all the other NS pairs playing the same board. Thus pairs are rewarded for playing the same cards better than others have played them. There is a predetermined schedule of fixtures depending on the number of pairs and boards to be played, to ensure a good mix of opponents, and that no pair plays the same board or the same opponents twice (see duplicate bridge movements ). In poker tournaments , as players are eliminated,

1653-688: Is usually no third place match to separate the third and fourth place teams. The concept is even more visible in college sports, most notably in reference to the NCAA Division I men's basketball tournament , in which millions of casual and serious fans "fill out brackets"—predict the winners of each game in the tournament—in both formal contests, sponsored by various corporations, and informal betting pools among friends or colleagues. The brackets are much larger than those in North American professional leagues—while no more than 16 teams qualify for

1710-1011: The American Football Conference and the National Football Conference in the NFL , the American League and the National League in Major League Baseball , and the Eastern Conference and the Western Conference in the NBA or NHL . When there are only two different conferences, there are two sides of the bracket. One conference is on one side, while the other is on the opposite side. Each side

1767-687: The Premier League are tournaments in the second sense, but not the first, having matches spread across many venues over a period of up to a season. Many tournaments meet both definitions; for example, the Wimbledon tennis championship . Tournaments "are temporally demarcated events, participation in which confers levels of status and prestige amongst all participating members". A tournament-match (or tie or fixture or heat ) may involve one or more game-matches (or rubbers or legs ) and if necessary one or more tiebreak-matches between

ITF Men's World Tennis Tour - Misplaced Pages Continue

1824-629: The Scottish Premiership and its historic predecessor, the Scottish Premier League , since 2000. After 33 games, when every club has played every other club three times, the division is split into two halves. Clubs play a further five matches, against the teams in their half of the division. This can (and often does) result in the team placed seventh having a higher points total than the team placed sixth (because their final five games are considerably easier), nevertheless,

1881-470: The "Championship Pool." Carrying over their entire round robin records with them, Championship Pool teams play one game against each of the four teams in the opposite pool, with the top four teams qualifying for the page playoffs . In contrast, teams that fail to qualify for the Championship Pool play only one additional "Placement Round" game against the team that finished in the same position in

1938-562: The Pacific Southwest Satellite played in Inglewood, California was a standalone event won by Mike Estep , and were officially the second tier of tournaments after the main tour and predated the introduction of challenger events in 1978, they then became the third tier of events and were discontinued following the 2006 season as the circuit moved exclusively to one-week Futures tournaments , the modern denomination for

1995-492: The best competitor in a game or sport, other methods exist. Tournaments of value have come to legitimise what are often seen as marginalised practices that sit outside of popular culture. For example, the Grammy Award ceremony helped to shape country music as a viable commercial field, and Booker Prize ceremony helped to create new fields of literary fiction. Tournaments of value go beyond game show and simple contests as

2052-633: The best four of six third-place sides qualified; at the 1999 Rugby World Cup the best one of five third-place sides did so. Sometimes, results from an earlier phase are carried over into a later phase. In the Cricket World Cup , the second stage, known as the Super Eight since 2007 and before that the Super Six, features two teams from each of four preliminary groups (previously three teams from two preliminary groups), who do not replay

2109-473: The competitors. For example, in the Davis Cup tennis tournament, a tie between two nations involves five rubbers between the nations' players. The team that wins the most rubbers wins the tie. In the later rounds of UEFA Champions League , each fixture is played over two legs . The scores of each leg are added, and the team with the higher aggregate score wins the fixture, with extra time, and if necessary,

2166-450: The defines qualification to the following stage. There may be other considerations besides reliability of rankings. In some professional team sports, weaker teams are given an easier slate of fixtures as a form of handicapping . Sometimes schedules are weighted in favour of local derbies or other traditional rivalries . For example, NFL teams play two games against each of the other three teams in their division, one game against six of

2223-625: The extra effort expended during the repechage. A family of tournament systems that grew from a system devised for the Victorian Football League, the historic predecessor to the Australian Football League (AFL), allow the teams with the best record before the playoffs to lose a game without being eliminated, whereas lesser qualifiers are not. Several of the most prominent leagues in Australia use such

2280-421: The following requirements for an ideal tournament: Many tournaments are held in multiple stages, with the top teams in one stage progressing to the next. American professional team sports have a "regular season" (group tournament) acting as qualification for the "post season" or " playoffs " (single-elimination tournament). A group stage (also known as pool play or the pool stage ) is a round-robin stage in

2337-521: The lowest one) and play their way to a higher tier. The entry fee for each tier is always higher than the fee for the tier below it, with the first tier being the cheapest. In professional tennis, satellite circuits were four-week tournaments (five before 1987), typically organised by a country's national tennis association and overseen by the International Tennis Federation . They were played by players who were ranked outside

ITF Men's World Tennis Tour - Misplaced Pages Continue

2394-415: The next round. As rounds progress, the number of competitors and fixtures decreases. The final round, usually known as the final or cup final, consists of just one fixture; the winner of which is the overall champion. In a single-elimination tournament , only the top-ranked competitors in a fixture progress; in 2-competitor games, only the winner progresses. All other competitors are eliminated. This ensures

2451-524: The number of fixtures per competitor is the Pot System. Under that system, competitors are divided to different "pots" based on predetermined ranking and are drawn to play one rival from each pot, including their own pot. For example, in a 36-team World Cup, teams would be divided into 3 pots, with each team playing 3 matches - one against a Pot A team, one against Pot B team, and one against a team from Pot C. All teams are then placed in one general standing

2508-567: The number of tables is gradually reduced, with the remaining players redistributed among the remaining tables. Play continues until one player has won all of the chips in play. Finishing order is determined by the order in which players are eliminated: last player remaining gets first place, last player eliminated gets second, previous player eliminated gets third, etc. In a "shootout" tournament, players do not change tables until every table has been reduced to one player. While tournament structures attempt to provide an objective format for determining

2565-443: The opposite pool for the purposes of determining final tournament ranking. For these teams, there is little else to play for since there is no form of relegation (and, with the expansion of the field to sixteen teams, no "pre-qualifying tournament") and seeding is based solely on the performances of the participating teams and not the past results of the provinces and territories they represent. The top Slovenian basketball league has

2622-483: The other twelve teams in their conference, and one game against five of the sixteen teams in the other conference. American sports are also unusual in providing fixtures between competitors who are, for ranking purposes, in different groups. Another, systematic, example of this was the 2006 Women's Rugby World Cup : each of the teams in Group A played each of the teams in Group B, with the groups ranked separately based on

2679-458: The player pathway between the junior game and the elite levels of professional tennis. The launch of the tour is the culmination of a series of ITF reforms designed to support talented junior players in their progression to the senior game, and target the prize money effectively at professional tournaments to enable more players to make a living. Ranking point distribution by seasons listed below. Satellite tournaments#Tennis A tournament

2736-506: The prize fund for each tournament is either US$ 15,000 or US$ 25,000. Some tournaments also provide housing for participants. Futures usually have sizable qualifying draws, which allow unranked players to enter tournaments and earn ATP ranking points. In 2019, reforms were made to the circuit, renaming it the ITF World Tennis Tour as a new umbrella name for former Pro Circuit and Junior Circuit tournaments and will serve as

2793-576: The quarterfinal stage ). Brackets are commonly found in major North American professional sports leagues and in U.S. college sports. Often, at the end of the regular season , the league holds a post-season tournament (most commonly called a playoff ) to determine which team is the best out of all of the teams in the league. This is done because often in American professional sports there are at least two different conferences , and teams mostly play other teams in their own conference. Examples of this are

2850-508: The results. (Groups C and D intertwined similarly.) An elaboration of this system is the Mitchell movement in duplicate bridge, discussed below , where north–south pairs play east–west pairs. In 2-competitor games where ties are rare or impossible, competitors are typically ranked by number of wins, with ties counting half; each competitors' listings are usually ordered Wins–Losses(–Ties). Where ties are more common, this may be 2 points for

2907-453: The round robin at eleven games. The teams are seeded using a ranking system in which points are calculated based on the teams' results in all competitive bonspiels using a complicated formula. Seeds 1, 4, 5, 8, 9, 12, 13 and 16 and placed in Pool A while seeds 2, 3, 6, 7, 10, 11, 14 and 15 are placed in Pool B. After each team has played seven games, the top four teams from each pool advance to

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2964-558: The sole ranking for the following season; the top teams from each division of the league are promoted to a higher division, while the bottom teams from a higher division are relegated to a lower one. This promotion and relegation occurs mainly in league tournaments, but also features in Davis Cup and Fed Cup tennis: The hierarchy of divisions may be linear, or tree-like, as with the English football league pyramid . In contract bridge

3021-483: The teams they have already played, but instead reuse the original results in the new league table. Formerly in the Swiss Football League , teams played a double round-robin, at which point they were split into a top "championship" group and a bottom "relegation" group; each played a separate double round-robin, with results of all 32 matches counting for ranking each group. A similar system is also used by

3078-617: The top few hundred by the Association of Tennis Professionals , with openings for unranked players in the qualifying draw. Total prize money ranged from $ 25,000 to $ 75,000 per circuit. ATP points were awarded on the basis of a player's ranking within the circuit and from 1987 onwards on the basis of the conversion of a player's circuit points into ATP points. Players successful at this level of pro tennis would move on to play ATP Challenger Series or even top-flight ATP Tour events. The men's satellite tournaments began as early as 1971 such as

3135-438: The tournament itself emerges as being more significant, bestowing status and prestige on the winner and, in the process, shapes industry practices and acts as institutional mechanisms for shaping social fields. A satellite tournament is either a minor tournament or event on a competitive sporting tour or one of a group of such tournaments that form a series played in the same country or region. A satellite tournament in poker

3192-421: The tournaments at the show. Since then, some other major tournaments have begun using the concept. Bracket (tournament) A bracket or tournament bracket is a tree diagram that represents the series of games played during a knockout tournament . Different knockout tournament formats have different brackets; the simplest and most common is that of the single-elimination tournament . The name "bracket"

3249-587: The winners of the initial round and of the consequent later matchups. This is called " bracketology ", particularly in relation to the NCAA Division I men's basketball tournament . This prediction is not possible in tournaments such as the FA Cup and the UEFA Champions League knockout phase, in which the pairings for a later round might not be made until after the previous round has been played ( UEFA Champions League makes its ultimate bracket draw at

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