The proper way to schedule a tournament is to seed your teams so they all play an EVEN MIX of strength - most commonly, you use a seed system. It's not perfect as the top seed never plays a top seed team (because they ARE the top seed team) while everybody else does, but, it does mean that all you have to do to advance out of the prelims with top-seed points is beat the top-seeded team you have to play, which is fair.
After seeding, you ALSO have to advance enough teams out of the prelims to make sure you almost certainly let your best teams advance even if they have an off game (or two) or the seeding didn't properly reflect the actual strength of the teams (which is a virtual certainty in a sport like paintball where you have a lot of teams with no history). Usually, you're going to want to take 2 teams from each 'group' - one to make sure you get the top team in each group, and the 2nd to catch any teams that may have managed to get double-seeded (you ended up with more than one team that deserves to advance in the same bracket).
The current Millenium method is obviously broken, and here is why: If I'm a new team, and I'm the 7th best team in the tournament with a bad seed, I'm screwed, because in order to advance, I need to beat the 1st, 3rd, 5th seeds. Wheras if I Were a crapp team but had the 12th seed, I'm almost guaranteed to advance, because I'm significantly better than all my opponents.
After seeding, you ALSO have to advance enough teams out of the prelims to make sure you almost certainly let your best teams advance even if they have an off game (or two) or the seeding didn't properly reflect the actual strength of the teams (which is a virtual certainty in a sport like paintball where you have a lot of teams with no history). Usually, you're going to want to take 2 teams from each 'group' - one to make sure you get the top team in each group, and the 2nd to catch any teams that may have managed to get double-seeded (you ended up with more than one team that deserves to advance in the same bracket).
The current Millenium method is obviously broken, and here is why: If I'm a new team, and I'm the 7th best team in the tournament with a bad seed, I'm screwed, because in order to advance, I need to beat the 1st, 3rd, 5th seeds. Wheras if I Were a crapp team but had the 12th seed, I'm almost guaranteed to advance, because I'm significantly better than all my opponents.
