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This time of tree tournament are not very accurate.
Perhaps number 1 would have been the winner against every other contestant, but that's about the only thing that has some degree of confidence in the result.
Imagine this, the second or third strongest contestant goes against the number one in the very first round. Only number one will advance. This results in the named second or third be nowhere near the real second or third at the end of the whole contest.
No result is meaningful here.
Same goes for sports and anything that uses a tree type contest.
The real solution would be to match every contestant against each other. At the end, give each one a score based on the result against all matches taking into account the relative strength of the adversary (ie wining against the strongest increases your score more, while winning against the weakest barely increases your score). There could be some recursion, and other issues, but the original argument stands.
Tree style contests are trash.