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Little League Ontario formats for the Provincial Tournaments follow Little League International guidelines and Canadian Tournament Policy. For 6 or fewer teams, Little League Ontario chooses Pool Play (Round-Robin) over Double Elimination brackets. For 7 or 9 teams, Little League Ontario chooses Double-Elimination brackets over Pool Play. For 8 teams, Little League Ontario allows a choice between the two types, and the one selected is almost always a two-pool Round-Robin (with play-offs). We've used the formats provided by Little League, though you might not recognize them at first because we've made modifications (solely for purposes of clarification and writing in our draws).
If you are interested, you can find Little League International's Tournament format documents as follows:
PLEASE NOTE: For the Double Eliminations, the bracket drawings in the PDF files are much clearer than in the Web Pages. You can thank Microsoft's "Save As... Web Page" for that.
| GAMES AND DAYS FOR PLAYOFF FORMATS | ||||||
| Single-Elimination | Double-Elimination | Round Robin | ||||
| Teams | Games | Days | Games | Days | Games | Days |
| n | g=n-1 | d=int(log2(g))+1 | g=(2*n)-1 | d=2*int(log2(g))+1 | g=n*(n-1)/2 | d=n-1 |
| 2 | 1 | 1 | 3 | 3 | 1 | 1 |
| 3 | 2 | 2 | 5 | 5 | 3 | 2 |
| 4 | 3 | 2 | 7 | 5 | 6 | 3 |
| 5 | 4 | 3 | 9 | 7 | 10 | 4 |
| 6 | 5 | 3 | 11 | 7 | 15 | 5 |
| 7 | 6 | 3 | 13 | 7 | 21 | 6 |
| 8 | 7 | 3 | 15 | 7 | 28 | 7 |
| 9 | 8 | 4 | 17 | 9 | 36 | 8 |
At the Ontario AGM in October 2005, item 10C:
(1) "Motion Jim T, seconded Joe V, that tournament formats be changed to 6 or less teams must play round robin, 7 or 9 teams must play double knock out, 8 teams can play double knock out or round robin, all approved formats are available on the Ontario Little League website. Carried."
(2) "Motion Jim T, seconded Jim D, that in 6, 5, 4 and 3 team round robin formats that the top 2 teams only advance to the championship game (no semi) and the Little League Canada tie-breaking method be used to establish 2nd place if necessary. Carried."
At the Ontario AGM in October 2006, item 9A:
(3) "Motion Joe V, seconded Bob A, to adopt the LL Canada 4, 5 & 6 team round robin format. Carried".
Note: Item (3) above required Ontario to use the LL Canada playoff format as well. This meant more teams making the playoff round, effectively nullifying most of item (2) above. In 2006 and in 2007, the Ontario Senior championship used the expanded playoff as required.
At the Ontario AGM in October 2008:
(4) I will reproduce the item from the Minutes when it they are available. To paraphrase, we changed the 6-team round-robin playoff format to be a simple 4-team single-elimination playdown of 1 vs 4 and 2 vs 3, with the winners playing the next day. This nullifies the use of the Little League Canada playoff format for 6 teams.
2010
(5) Little League Canada had to drop their expanded playoff format as it did not fall within guidelines set by Little League International. They changed their 6 team format to match ours. They also added a line to Tournament Policy that said for Tournaments with fewer than 6 teams, the playoffs would be 3rd place vs 2nd place in a semi-final, and the winner plays 1st place in a final. An Ontario exception is a 3-team tournament, in which the playoff is just 2nd vs 1st.
(6) At the October 2010 AGM, it was voted to add optional formats of Double Elimination for tournaments of 4, 5 and 6 teams.
Last Updated: Saturday, May 21st, 2011 at 8:52 PM