Playoff Format - Best-of Formats

Best-of Formats

The "best-of" formats refers to a head-to-head competition where the two competitors compete to first win the majority of the games allotted to win the "series". If a competitor wins a majority of the games, the remaining games may be discarded. This is a modification of the single elimination tournament to allow more matches to be held. Moreover, if it can be said that one competitor has a higher probability of winning a single game (and game results are i.i.d.), the likelihood that this competitor wins the series increases when more games are played. For example, if team A has a seventy percent chance of winning team B in a single game, its probability of winning a best-of-three series against B is 78.4 percent, and its probability of winning a best-of-seven series is about 87.4 percent.