"Lazarus had a one on one tournament a while back. Actually it may still be going on. He used a first round format similer to world cup soccer."
I figured someone had come up with this idea. I still want to give it a shot though.
"He also had all the games on a preamade map, which was interesting, but maybe not that needed for one on one games. Personal opinion I guess."
I doubt I'd do a premade map. I think it would be better to just use a generated map for each game. That way by the end of the tourney no one would have the map memorized.
"No reason you'd have to limit it to 20 players though is there? Actually if you want to have even brackets and no byes you need to have a number of players that is a power of 2. 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, etc."
That is true. I didn't think about having byes by the second round. I'm willing to go for a 32 player format. 16 players in each bracket. If it is possible to get that many players willing to play. If not we will have to go with a 16 player format with 8 in each bracket.
"10 versus 1 is not a problem at all actually. That's how most one on one tourney's with seeding work. Other alternatives are a pure random draw for the first round."
Right you are, (as always, eh?

), if I did a pure random draw how would be the best way to go about this? Once everyone signs up just start assigning players to others?
"EDIT: Oh, I misread that. You mean to have a ten man game as a seeding game. That's doab;e I suppose, but you realize the ten man seeding games woudl take about 4 times as long to finish as the rest of the tourney combined."
Yeah, that's what I was thinking of doing. But like you mentioned it would take forever to play the seeding games. Thus I think having a pure random draw would be best.
Speaking of which, I think I might have figured a way of doing so. It's a rather old trick. Get all players signed up, then write their names on paper, put them in a hat, and draw.

Like I said, it's an old trick but it is a very effective one. And I think it would be more fair then me picking players and assigning them slots. People would probably think I would be working the tourney in my favor then.
But anyways, I think I will go through with this. Just got to get the bugs worked out of it.