Tournament

A tournament 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 distinct senses:

  1. A competition involving a number of matches, each involving a subset of the competitors, with the overall tournament winner determined based on the combined results of these individual matches.
  2. One or more competitions held at a single venue and concentrated into a relatively short time interval.

The first sense is common in sports and games where each match must involve a small number of competitors, often precisely two, as in most competitive team sports, racket sports, combat sports, card games, and board games. Such tournaments allow large numbers to compete against each other in spite of the restriction on numbers in a single match. All golf tournaments meet the second definition, but while match play tournaments also meet the first, stroke play tournaments do not, since there are no distinct matches within such tournaments. In contrast, association football leagues like the Premier League hold tournaments only in the first sense, as matches are spread across many venues over an extended period of time. Many tournaments meet both definitions; for example, the Wimbledon tennis championship.

The term match may be used in multiple ways. Most commonly, it is used to refer to a tournament-match (or series, fixture, or tie), the results of which are used in some way to determine the winner of a tournament. It can also refer to a game-match (or game, rubber, or leg), one or more of which are used to determine the result of a single tournament-match. If necessary, one or more tiebreak-matches may also take place. Sometimes there are further layers, such as in tennis, where a tie (or match) can consist (but not always) of sets which themselves consist of games. For example, in the Major League Baseball postseason, a series between two teams involves up to five or seven games between the two teams, with the team that reaches three ("best of five") or four ("best of seven") wins winning the series. 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, 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.

This article is issued from Wikipedia. The text is available under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 unless otherwise noted. Additional terms may apply for the media files.