Most major Tennis tournaments (for that matter any major tournaments like cricket or football) are seeded! This means that the top-seeded players are much more likely to meet in the latter stages of the tournament. This is helpful from a number of aspects. A top player who has trained hard doesn’t really want to go out to the world number one in the first round.
Basically if world number one and two meet very early in the tournament and each game is elimination round then very early in the tournament you have a big upset! The second place is decided later but the person who is actually deserving to get the second place may go out early!
Even from a sponsorship and commercial perspective, a tournament that builds to a clash of the titans in the final few rounds, is exactly where you want to be!
The mathematics of tournaments actually needs every player and team to play with each other and get subsequently eliminated! The IPL is one example which is a better format to get the good team or players! But this cannot be used for all the games since it is time and resource consuming.
Of course the introduction of seeded tournament has given a possible balance to games and tournaments but even seeded tournaments are not perfect! It is however better than non seeded ones!
A popular game like tennis was in the early years, non seeded! So you can very well imagine the shock of a seeded player getting eliminated in the early rounds! Come a mathematician called Charles Dodgson.
Charles also was also interested in lawn tennis and frustrated with the non seeded nature of the tournament. He wanted to make them fairer, more logical, more mathematically perfect!
Charles wrote about the rules of lawn tennis tournaments after talking to somebody who was upset after he lost in the first round and then saw a player much weaker than himself make his way into the finals!
Those days the games were played by draws which were composed randomly, so the best and second-best players could very easily meet in the first round!
Charles offered his solution in an essay named, “Lawn Tennis Tournaments, The True Method of Assigning Prizes with a Proof of the Fallacy of the Present Method.”
While novel his system wasn’t as simple as the method in use today. He created a complex tournament structure in which players could not be eliminated in the first round. Losers kept playing until they had three superiors, three people who had beaten them or beaten someone who had beaten them!
Now of course this method may not work since the time and effort required would have been huge! But monographs and materials like these were responsible for the change in the game play and the way tournaments were conducted including the introduction of the seeded method!
Now there is a chance that not many took Charles seriously when they found his pen name and he had written a book about a girl called Alice who goes down a hole following a talking rabbit! You would have heard of the book! and his pen name! The Author of many books including Alice in Wonderland! Charles Dogson also known by his pen name, Lewis Carroll! Just because he was a mathematician does not mean that he does not have imagination! TV serials and some movies especially in India also needs lots of imagination and to play roles which are routine looks simple only because of the talent of the actor! One such actor was Rituraj Singh; Gone too soon…
Heartfelt condolences, OM SHANTHI…
Now did you know that Alice in Wonderland is told in the format or idea of a dream!? Sleep and try to dream part 2!
Good Night!
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