I know that in English class they tell you to open with your thesis/topic sentence. But I’m freed from the tyranny of formal education, so I can do whatever I want. And what I want to start with is what this article is NOT about. I’m going to be ragging on the practice of the B-Tier bracket pretty hard, but I think that credit should be given where credit is due. Implementing a B-Tier bracket is an attempt to solve the skill disparity problem that is emerging in HEMA. As opposed to most events which just ignore the issue and continue with the status quo.
First of all, let’s define the problem. In HEMA, unlike real grown up sports, there are no formal standings, nor leagues of different skill levels. Everyone who wants to fight just shows up to a tournament. Which was fine in the beginning when everybody sucked. But after years of training and building up the level of HEMA performance we now have people who suck less. This is a great accomplishment for the community, but introduces some growing pains.
Imagine if whoever in a region who wanted to play baseball showed up at the same event. Beer leaguers and semi-pro athletes. That would probably make for some pretty weird games that don’t serve the interests of anyone involved. And that is where we are getting to with our HEMA tournaments.
B-Tier Bracket
So, what is a B-Tier Bracket? It’s actually a whole host of potentially different implementations, but the fundamental concept is you have people fight pools and then sort them into different tiers of elimination brackets. Kari Baker did a good analysis of Combat Con’s implementation on SwordSTEM – Combat Con 2022: Why Sample Size Matters – so I’ll reference it a few times in this article. It has a more detailed description of how they set up a B-Tier bracket if you want more information. (They actually used A, B and C brackets. But it’s the same underlying concept.)
The logic is that you want to give the people who aren’t A-Tier fighters a place where they can also compete and have a good experience. Which is a very admirable goal, tournaments should offer a good “field of play” for everyone involved.
Seal Clubbing
Seal clubbing is when an experienced fighter is paired with a newer fighter and basically beat the crap out of them. While jokes about these matchups make it sound very violent, this typically means blanking them on the scoreboard rather than any specific malicious intent. But the speed and intensity of an experienced fighter can be a very jarring experience nonetheless. As a general rule experienced HEMA fencers tend to be very supportive of beginners, and fence down to their level to help them learn and grow. EXCEPT in a tournament, where they really, really, don’t want to get some dumb luck and end up losing to someone much less skilled than they are.
This is also not so great an experience on the more experienced fighter’s side. They come to tournaments to test themselves in high-intensity competition against their peers. Spending over half of their tournament matches beating people up they could easily trounce is something they can probably do with the beginner and intermediate fighters within their own school. So you are basically wasting the time of both the high and low end fighters in the pool!
Unfortunately a B-Tier bracket does absolutely nothing to fix this in the pools. It’s just a little band-aid on at the end to say “we know that sucked for you, but here have a few extra matches”.
A-Tier Medal Bandits
This is a lesser thought of, and bit more insidious side to having a B-Tier bracket. I’ll start by quoting Kari’s conclusions in her Combat Con analysis:
“Tier 2 was a little less clean than Tier 1, however some of the results were pretty much expected. For those who made it to the gold and bronze medal matches, three of them were expected to have been placed in Tier 1, with the last medalist being a newcomer without a rank.
Tier 3 also ended up pretty much as you would expect it. Two folks that were allegedly destined for Tier 1 ended up in this section, and both of them took home medals. The other medalist as well as the fourth-place finisher in this tier was expected to have ended up in Tier 2.”
What does this mean? Your legitimate “B-Tier” fencers are by and large out of medal contention for the B-Tier bracket! In most cases all your B-Tier medals are going to be stolen by A-Tier fighters who had a bad morning in the pools. Which is, put mildly, a sub-optimal experience for the people you’re trying to serve by creating a B-Tier in the first place.
It’s Easy To Criticize…
Like I said at the start, I think the fact that B-Tier brackets have been implemented to help solve the skill disparity issue is a step in the right direction and an indication that people are starting to take it more seriously. The reason I’m being so harsh is there is a much better solution that is easy to implement. And that is skill divisions; simply offer an A and B-Tier tournament. (Or C, D, etc depending on how many skill gradations you have.)
In my SwordSTEM article Bigger Tournaments Don’t Mean More Fights! I go into a bit of how stratifying a tournament based on skill divisions produces more meaningful fights. The SwordSTEM article approaches it from the point of view of the advanced fencer, but it’s the same concept for everyone involved. Bottom line, having a big tournament doesn’t really help anyone, it’s how close people in the tournament are in skill.
The biggest issue with splitting into tiers is: who goes where? Which is a hurdle to overcome, but is by and large less of an issue than people make of it. Once people have competed once in a region they will have a pretty good idea where they fall. Even if they haven’t competed they probably have an instructor who does know the region. And, on the off chance they have to guess, the 3 possible outcomes aren’t exactly catastrophic:
- They guess right. Yay! 🙂
- They overestimate their skill. They might get beat up in A-Tier, but getting beat up by A-Tier fighters is what would happen in the pools even with a B-Tier bracket available. Ultimately this just hurts people who are overconfident and assume they are A-Tier without adequate tournament experience. I’m cool with that.
- They underestimate their skill. They happen to be better than most of B-Tier, and end up winning it. But guess what, someone has to win the B-Tier. If they are unfamiliar with the tournament scene, end up winning a tournament, and then moving up to A-Tier, is that such a big deal? Given how long it’s going to take to claw up to the top of A-Tier it’s good that they got a chance at success before the jump.
And then there is the prospect of having organizers sort the competitors, realistically only accomplishable with a data set like HEMA Ratings. (My preferred solution.)
The TL;DR
- Having everyone in the same tournament pools, and then offering a B-Tier bracket is trying to solve a problem that should be solved.
- Having everyone in the same tournament pools, and then offering a B-Tier bracket is a poor solution to the problem it is trying to solve.
- Having much smaller skill division tournaments, where everyone is as close as possible in ability, gives people the highest number of matches and the most meaningful tournament experience.