Fighting is popular not because we have fighting contests but because it is something that many people do for its own sake. The prevalence of elimination tournaments is one of the things wrong with the way we do fighting, not one of the reasons for its popularity. For crown tournaments we must have an objective way of determining who has won, since our Kingdoms would not work very well if the reigning monarchs could, by naming the day's best fighter, choose their successors. That is why crown tournaments are, and perhaps must be, elimination lists. But I think it is a mistake to make so many other tournaments into small scale imitations of the crown.
Elimination tournaments allow the less experienced fighters to do very little fighting.
Worse, by encouraging the idea that we are fighting to win a tournament, rather than for fun, honor, and glory, they have some tendency to make fighting less fun and less friendly than it might otherwise be. The winner of a medieval tournament was the fighter who, after the day's fighting was done, was judged to have fought best-but he did not have to prove it by working his way up a double elimination tree. Perhaps, if we wish to encourage medieval arts, we should take our model not from fighting but from the other medieval art of which we have at least enough-politics. The people of our kingdoms, as in the kingdoms of old, require no public competitions, no special prizes, to engage in that activity. It is done for its own sake, for the pleasure of the game and the rewards proper to it.