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I see a ton of people looking at tourney results lately and treating them as stone facts, and ignoring the tidal wave of issues that cause those facts to be...not so factual. Many people don't understand how Swiss works, or why it's an imperfect yet necessary system, so let's have some education! (Maybe then we can see less "necrons or eldar didn't win 1st wtf is going on?!" threads.)

To start, the most accurate form of tournament would be a round-robin, with "best-of x games" matches. In 40k, this is highly impractical on both fronts, except for maybe a 4 man tourney that takes an entire weekend or is done over an extended time period.

We obviously don't want half the field to go home after round 1 like single elimination, therefore we turn to Swiss style. Everyone gets to play and a ranking can be determined after a relatively small number of rounds compared to the number of players.
In case anyone isn't aware, in Swiss, players are paired up each round to face other players with similar w/l records, and they cannot play the same opponent twice, but the rest is randomized. May Swiss styles use opponent win % as a primary tiebreaker after records, but most 40k ones use mission points.

Ok, so now that we're caught up on what it is and why we use it, we can go into the issues it presents.
(For the sale of simplicity, let's assume a 6 round 64 man tournament.)

-bad matchups can ruin you, good ones ruin the opponent.
In 40k, magic, and many other game with a pre-planning "meta game" section, some of the games that you haven't even started yet were already wins or losses for you because of this. Because you have no control over who your next opponent is, this factor is entirely luck based. Your sudden bad matchup could show up on any round. A few examples are necrons being pitted against a heavy strength d eldar list, or a ground-tyranids list running into 5 knights. These are also known as "hard counters" or "the rock to your scissors." Generalist lists can also lose out here by running into hardcore focused lists, such as having half a dozen flyers when the enemy has all of one antiair element. (The fact that many tournament lists end up being highly focused has led to many making the "paper rock scissors" comparison.) Take it from someone who has been dealing with Swiss style for a very long time: matchups can carry you or destroy you faster than any mid-game play.

-Anyone can get lucky/unlucky in a game.
Your rerollable reserve roll fails until turn 4. Your draigostar scatters 12" and mishaps. Your psyker perils and offs himself and half his squad. You snapshot with a lascannon, hitting, penetrating, and blowing up a flyer, killing the entire squad inside, while the crash and burn scatters into another squad of his, who lose a few, fail their morale and flee 12" off the table. While these things are unlikely, in the span of 6 games, it's not at all surprising to see something like it happen to you at least once. Some of them, such as the draigostar one, can literally be an insta-loss for the player. Even if the cold dice don't result in a single catastrophe, a long string of cold dice can be just as bad. Even a list that "wins on a 2+" still loses 1/6 games. The Swiss "best of 1" style tournament matches make no distinction between winning by luck, skill, or other factors.

-some players just aren't actually all that good
Plenty of people show up to tourneys. Some show up because they are a shoe-in for best painted, or they're a club regular and live nearby. Typically, the more serious players are the ones driving in from out of town, but even that's not always true. You can have a real hometown slugger or a guy from 2 hours away because he lives in arkansas and good game stores are very rare (yes I'm bitter.) regardless of reason, some players of low-moderate skill will enter and populate the bottom of the rankings unless they get particularly lucky. Using "x army placed really low" as evidence of the army being good or bad is sketchy at best, unless that evidence has been repeated a large number of times.

-You don't have to be the strongest player there. You just have to beat 6 random guys.
Okay, it's not quite THAT simple, as the people you face are THEORETICALLY better than the ones you face earlier, as they have better records, but their current placement can also be a product of the previously mentioned matchup luck and dice luck. You can in fact end up playing for first against a relatively weak opponent who has just gotten very lucky to get that far. A bit rare, but it can and does happen. Skill DOES matter in 40k. Skilled players WILL win a high ratio of games. It's just that sometimes, that specific tournament turns out to be the "loss" part of their otherwise awesome ratio.

-there are even further factors, such as which players couldn't show up that day, which ones didn't get enough sleep or have been abusing the open bar too much etc, as well as the issue that there just may not be any players of that particular faction in that area. (In some of my ITC number crunching, I noticed a tourney that simply had no eldar players at all.)

Hopefully this quick rundown of the Swiss style tournament format helps people understand its limitations, and helps them understand that any conclusions need to be drawn from a large pool of results of many tournaments to cut down on the absolutely monstrous number of variables in 40k that may cause an unusual or misleading outcome. How may do you need? With all these variables, I don't even know if 500 is enough, but I'd say 10-15 definitely gives off a discernible pattern. If you see someone point out a single tournament result as "proof" of anything at all, please point them to this post so that they can learn a bit more about the tournament system most widely used in 40k.

Except that the worst of the hype claims that Eldar (and Necrons) are so unstoppable that they'll just steamroll any list put before them with no possible way to fight back.

Predictions were also made that Eldar and Necrons would be the only army to win tourneys anymore. Again, didn't happen.

Point is, there is still enough wiggle room for "lesser" armies to compete, so we don't all have to choose between playing Eldar or taking our ball and going home.

 Jimsolo wrote:
Except that the worst of the hype claims that Eldar (and Necrons) are so unstoppable that they'll just steamroll any list put before them with no possible way to fight back.

Predictions were also made that Eldar and Necrons would be the only army to win tourneys anymore. Again, didn't happen.

Point is, there is still enough wiggle room for "lesser" armies to compete, so we don't all have to choose between playing Eldar or taking our ball and going home.

People said that after the first tournament with the new Necron codex, and certainly enough we started having more consistent results after the second one. People need to time to test and build/paint gak, ya know?

Those are good points and all, but gentlemen, I believe you may be slightly off topic in this thread.
Do you have any comments or questions about the Swiss tournament format?