Tournament Bracket Curation

Suppose you’re at an art gallery and you want to buy two paintings to hang on the wall in your office. There are nine paintings to choose from. How would you choose?

One thing you might try is what I call tournament bracket curation. You pit the paintings against each other two at a time in a double-elimination tournament bracket.

An Example

Let’s take an example. Here are the nine paintings I have to choose from, which I’ve labeled A through I.

Then I pair them up and pick my favorite of each pair:

A vs. B: B wins

C vs. D: D wins

E vs. F: E wins

G vs. H: H wins

I is left over and will be in the first pairing of the next round.

It’s probably best to keep track of this on a spreadsheet, especially if there are many items that you need to curate and rank. After the first round, this is what the second round matchups will look like:

I vs. B: I wins

D vs. E: E wins

H vs. A: H wins

C vs. F: F wins

G vs. I (since both of these had only 1 match so far): I wins

At this point, we have a clear top three:

Since I’m choosing two from a top three, the easiest way is to just look at paintings I, E, and H and eliminate the one I like the least, which is H.

After a tournament bracket curation session of the nine paintings, I’ve decided on my two favorites:

If I had to choose a favorite among these two, it would be Painting I.

Uses

You can use this method in call kinds of cases. Whenever you have a lot items that you need to whittle down to a few best, you can set up a spreadsheet to keep track of matches and pit pairs against each other. It’s always easiest to work with pairs.

In the past, I have used this method to pick only the best images, videos, books, articles, and even ideas. You can make or break rules as you see fit, since this is not an exact science. Instead, use this idea as a tool for helping you choose the few exceptional items from a large pool of good items.