Update from the IRF Worlds Seeding Committee
As the first truly global roundnet event, the World Championship offers many long-awaited international matchups. However, it also comes with some challenges - with so little history of global competition, determining the best process to pre-seed (and seed for bracket) teams that have never played one another is a humbling task. Ultimately, the IRF Seeding Committee has resolved to prioritize competition between countries as much as possible while minimizing the impact of its exhaustive pre-seeding efforts. This perspective has inspired a modified approach for seeding the individual team brackets.
The Considerations
Roundnet tournaments typically utilize two types of seeding processes: (1) “slotting” a bracket where the placement within each pool has a predetermined seed in the bracket or (2) ordering teams by record and point differential.
Slotted seeding is a format that avoids rematches. However, with little data on many of the teams competing, there is no compelling support to constrain teams to slotted seeds. For example, a team in the last pool with an undefeated record would be relegated to the 25 seed, and the IRF Seeding Committee prefers to allow teams an opportunity to earn a higher (or lower) seed.
Comparing records and average point differentials across all pools to seed brackets allows more ability for teams to prove their strength and earn a higher seed. However, with many teams having the same record there is a massive emphasis on point differential and no way to avoid intra-country conflicts or pool play rematches.
The seeding committee thought hard about this dilemma and found a solution that allows enough self-correction of the initial seeds while avoiding conflicts in the bracket stage. It makes point differential matter, but not the end-all factor.
How it works
Teams are initially seeded by number of losses, head-to-head, and point differential
Teams with the same number of losses may move no more than two seeds to avoid pool play rematches or country conflicts
Teams must stay within their initial projected finish round (ie the 1-4 seeds, 5-8 seed, 9-16 seeds, etc will all stay within that range)
The Process
Conflicts are solved by round, starting at the end and working backward (ie remove conflicts in the round of 4, then round of 8, then round of 16)
In each round, start by solving the conflicts amongst the lowest seeded, then the next lowest, and so on.
To solve a conflict, the first attempt is to move the lowest seed with a conflict down one position, then two. If that does not work, move them up one or two positions.
In Action
Here’s what seeding committee member Ben Dantowitz of USA Roundnet had to say about the topic:
Throughout the seeding process, it has become apparent that pre-seeding the numerous teams attending the IRF World Championship is a task that is not possible to achieve with meaningful precision given the tournament structure — pool play will be limited to 4-5 single games between teams of highly disparate skill levels, and generally point differentials will be more noise than a meaningful measure of skill.
Understanding the pre-seeding of the event cannot be conducted with meaningful, provable precision, the bracket seeding will generally be a random shuffle of teams by record across over a dozen pools, and seeds in and of themselves may not strongly correlate with the strength of an individual team...
The IRF Seeding Committee recommends utilizing a backing-out process to adjust bracket seeds in the interest of (a) reducing intra-country conflict/matches in favor of promoting more international competition and (b) reducing the likelihood of rematches from pool play for the sake of expanded connections and player interaction on the international stage, and (c) not overweighting the seeding implications of a generally high-variance, low-fidelity pool play system.
