I should probably know how to do this, but it's been a few years since I took stats in uni, and I feel like I'm calculaing this wrong.
Essentially, me and a few friends are in a tournement for a game. It's a 5v5, and there were originally 64 teams of 5. These teams were then sorted into 16 groups of 4. The top 2 teams of each group of 4 (after round robin) moved on to top 32, which is a standard single elimination bracket.
However, the tournement has 5 teams that the organizers are associated with, and as it would turn out, after "randomly" shuffling the teams, the earliest any of them could play against one another was top 8. Teams were not shuffled after the original round robin either, it was predetermined where on the bracket 1st place and second place from each group would go.
So what I'm trying to figure out is, what are the odds of this? It sorta feels like the TOs are trying to maximize their odds of not having to pay out to the winners. Luckily it was free to join but they are claiming it was completely random. This apparently happened last time too
Pic related is the bracket