Talk:Seed (sports)

Diagrams
I think some diagrams would be useful. Jabberwockgee (talk) 19:19, 11 June 2009 (UTC)

“Other Sports” section is impossible to understand.
I came here to get an idea about tournament seeding so I could explain it to my kids. This section is impossible to understand and needs to be rewritten. ClayHarryman (talk) 02:45, 20 March 2018 (UTC)

I agree! In fact the idea "why seed?" can be clearer in the intro (i.e. to avoid pairs of very strong players to met and eliminate one another in the very first matches, thus making the whole tournament less interesting). As it is written now, the introduction is understandable only if one already knows what seeding is. Further sections are based on this a bit confusing introduction and thus are unclear too. Indeed wikipedia is intended to lay readers, thus long sentences might me shortened and concessions made on the "strictness" in favor of clarity? 109.252.62.66 (talk) 05:34, 18 June 2018 (UTC)

Re-seeding in tennis?
The last paragraph in "Tennis" section reads

Sometimes the remaining competitors in a single-elimination tournament will be "re-seeded" so that the highest surviving seed is made to play the lowest surviving seed in the next round, the second-highest plays the second-lowest, etc. This may be done after each round, or only at selected intervals.

I'm not familiar with that practice in tennis. All ATP and WTA official tournaments have full draws published before the tournament starts, so re-seeding is impossible there. Maybe this practice is present in other sports but in such a case it should be moved away from "Tennis" section.

I'm going ahead and moving it to the general section, with citation needed tag, as I cannot find references about it but it seems likely that some disciplines indeed use this practice. --Piotr Zaborski (talk) 12:06, 4 July 2018 (UTC)

reason for tiered seeding in tennis
This unsourced statement seems to me just speculation (and very likely incorrect):

"Rankings of tennis players, based on a history of performance, tend to change positions gradually, and so a more "equitable" method of determining the pairings might result in many of the same head-to-head match-ups being repeated in successive tournaments."

Even in scare quotes, "equitable" represents a judgment that ought to be supported or omitted. Tennis seedings actually change rather rapidly, and I know of no evidence that a more conventional seeding regime would result in more frequent rematches.

Being a newcomer here, I'm reluctant to mess with other people's work. Also, mindful of the rule against original research, I'm reluctant to replace this speculation with what I think is a better explanation of why tennis uses tiered seeding because I have no better source than my own blog:. Essentially, tiered seeding eliminates the undesirable possibility that a player will benefit, on average, by having a lower seed, thus giving them some incentive to game the process that generates the seeding. The procedure also tends to cause early-round matches to be more competitive:.

Guidance for a novice editor will be appreciated. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Tourneygeek (talk • contribs) 12:43, 4 July 2018 (UTC)