The Role of Simulation in Sports Tournament Design for Game Sport

There are m any alternative stru ctures to tournaments for gam e sports and over time tournaments have revised their st ructures. In m aking a revision to a tournament structure, there will be de sirable characteristics that must be maintained or im proved. Such c haracteristics include accurately ranking the strongest teams, increased revenue from audiences and sponsors and m aintaining or improving player welfare. The purpose of the current investigation was to use the All-Ireland Gaelic Football Championship as an exam ple of how alternative tournament designs can be com pared using simulation packages w ritten in MATLAB7.0.1. Desirable aspects of the pre-2001 and current structure of the tournament were compared when re levant progression statistics were accumulated during sim ulations. T he simulation study rev ealed no significant difference in the strengths of the wi nning teams of the two t ournament structures but did reveal that significantly stronger teams were los ing finalists and semifinalists in the current structure than in the pre-2001 structure. The proportions of winning teams, runners up and losing se mi-finalists from different provinces was significantly different to the proportions of all team s that were from different provinces in both tournam ent structures investigated. This investigation has shown that computer simulation can efficiently provide information beneficial to decision making when designing sports tournaments.