The Official SMITE Magazine eSports Edition | Page 23

organize the teams for the most
interesting results in a tournament.
A tournament falls flat if the two best
teams face off in the first match,
resolving the entire tournament at
the very beginning. To prevent this
from happening organizers pair
teams that have opposing seeds. So
the top seed plays against the bottom
seed, the runner up plays against
the second to lowest seed etc.
A team’s seed is set just before
the tournament starts. It can be
determined through a season,
a league or a mini-tournament
just before the actual event itself,
depending on the type of tournament
and the surrounding circumstances.
For the SMITE World Championship
a team’s seed has been determined
through a long season of weekly
tournaments, culminating in
the Regionals to determine the
top two teams of that region.
Another important term to know
is ‘elimination tournament’. While
self explanatory at first glance, it is
important to understand how this
affects a tournament’s brackets.
As you might have guessed, an
elimination tournament is based on
the process of eliminating teams
until one is left standing as the
victor. Depending on the bracket
type, elimination can take place
after one, two or even more losses.
Once a team has lost a requisite
amount of times, it is completely
eliminated from the tournament.
Not all tournaments are elimination
tournaments. There are also
tournament types (see Round Robin
below) that work off of accumulated
points or wins instead of a process
of elimination. These point based
tournaments are sometimes used to
determine seeding for an elimination
tournament, as they give each team
a ‘fair’ chance to prove themselves
without immediately being eliminated.
A common term throughout
sports, best of X (BoX, with ‘X’ being
an odd number) is used to describe

how many games are played, and
the highest number of games won
determines the winner of the match.
The most common ones in eSports
are Bo1, Bo3 and Bo5, each requiring
a minimum of one, two or three
wins respectively to win the match.
Usually, when a team reaches the
requisite amount of wins before
the total number of games are
played, the remaining matches are
scrapped, as they no longer affect
the result of the match and would
unnecessarily drain the players.
A ‘bye’ is a term that’s used in
tournaments with an odd number
of teams participating. This means

that one of the teams skips the first
round and immediately advances to
the second round. This is usually the
highest seeded team, as they have
proven themselves most capable
prior to the event, and thus deserving
of this advantage. In a tournament
that uses random placement of
teams, one team is just lucky.
The final term that could pop up
in reading and describing brackets is
‘group play’. This essentially means
that the teams are divided into groups,
and the winners of these groups move
on to the quarter-finals (round of
eight), semi-finals (round of four) or
finals, depending on the amount of

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