Two different rulebooks, a system not typically designed to send out the number of teams being advanced to the next round, and more than a few people expressing their confusion on Twitter—these are the issues being talked about by the teams that just finished competing in FACEIT’s North American Closed Qualifier for the Americas Minor Championship.

The North American Closed Qualifier saw 16 teams battling it out for six slots at the Americas Minor Championship which eventually leads to qualification for the FACEIT Major taking place in London, Sept. 20-23. For the initial closed qualifiers, FACEIT decided to use the Swiss Tournament System over that of the GSL and other tournament formats.

The Swiss System plays a set number of rounds where after the first round each team is randomly matched up against a team with the same number of wins that they have not played before. Each team will play until a set number of wins or losses is accrued.

However, when the system you use for advancing teams to the next round, playoff, or tournament automatically creates a three-way tie for the final advancing slot, there are going to be some unhappy teams. Such was the case on Monday when Swole Patrol advanced to the Americas Minor Championship, by virtue of having the best map differential, beating out Team One and Luminosity Gaming. All three teams had 3-2 records.

With a group of 16 teams, the system generally works very well and creates an equal number of teams that get three wins or three losses. 16 teams coupled with the Swiss System creates eight teams that typically advance with three wins and eight teams that are eliminated with three losses. However, when advancing six teams to the next round from the 16 competing in the Swiss System, if forces a circumstance which most tournament organizers try to avoid—a three-way tie.

And it was how the three-way tie was handled that is creating controversy.

It was Samuel “SileNt” Portillo’s tweet on Saturday that kicked off the discussion.

Someone pls help me understand this. Weird how nobody else caught onto this unless i’m misinformed 6 teams are supposed to qualify to the NA minor but this system is for 8 teams to make it? 6-8th teams that make it will be 3-2 so how will that get decided? @FACEIT @roaldvanbuuren pic.twitter.com/lAqlu1clg2 — Samuel Portillo (@SileNtCSGO) June 24, 2018

It what amounted to a confusing situation for some of the participating teams, FACEIT initially mailed out the rules for the closed qualifier without the format listed for the tie-breaking procedure. Teams hadn’t really caught on that there would be an automatic three-way tie for the sixth and finals spot. In a reply to SileNt, the Director of Esports for FACEIT, Roald Van Buuren, stated that the rules were posted in the discord before it was opened up to the teams. The point of contention became that because they were sent the rules via email initially, there should have been a follow-up email sent to all the teams with the tie-breaking procedures attached instead of assuming the teams would read the rules posted in discord.

As the argument over whether or not the rulebook should have been resent to all the teams took shape from some of the teams involved, another started to emerge. The tie-breaking procedure itself.

After the first round, all teams are randomly matched up against team with similar records and through sheer luck of the draw, some teams will have an easier path than others on their way to qualifying. Take for instance eUnited. They are an up and coming, talented squad that qualified because of wins over the 15th-16th, 12th-14th, and 9th-11th finishing teams. Luminosity Gaming on the other hand, with a 3-2 record, finished seventh having faced NRG who tied for first with a 3-0 record and Dignitas who tied for third with a 3-1 record.

Swole Patrol eventually won the tie-breaker sweepstakes, but in an unusual turn of events Team One played a fifth round match that had no meaning. Even if they had won 2-0, there was no scenario in which they could advance due to the tie-breaking criteria.

The issue teams have highlighted with the tie-breaking procedure isn’t the procedure itself, but that the team’s statistics related to the criteria aren’t an accurate measure of competitive worthiness as shown during the event. This is due to the randomness of both the opponents and maps being played. Common opponents are lacking and maps are random as they are selected by the pick/ban process. Statistical comparisons make much more sense when teams have common opponents and have played the same map the same amount of times.

A tie-breaking procedure that would serve in helping to eliminate this sort of randomness would be to take the last three eligible teams and seed them one through three. The highest seeded team would get a bye and play the winner of the match between the No. 2 and No. 3 seeded teams with the winner of that match receiving the bid into the next qualifier.

The qualification process for events such as a Counter-Strike: Global Offensive Major is a numbers games that is difficult to master. With thousands of teams trying qualify for the biggest stage in the CSGO scene, tournament organizers are under a lot of scrutiny in making sure they are running a qualification process that makes sense and is fair.