Yea something like that might work. At one big tournament from last year that had like 170ish people, they didn't feel like doing a 256 people bracket so they made pools where everyone was put into 16 groups of like 10 or 11 people, and you played everyone in the group and the top 4 moved on to play in the actual 64 people bracket. Of course we don't have nearly enough people for that so it'd have to be on a smaller scale, plus it would take a bit longer to do something like that. Like if theres 40 people have 8 pools of 5 and have top 2 or 4 advance if you want a 16 or 32 people bracket so that would be 4 matches for everyone before the bracket actually starts.
Suppose we could just like lay down the groups according to seeds and have like smashville be a default stage for everyone to use first game and just have everyone play each other at their own leisure for the pools. That way everyone gets at LEAST 4 games in, and then we could just take top 2 for a 16 people bracket to decide it overall or something. I could see that taking just as long as the 128 bracket tourney did even though its only 40 people though.
Suppose we could just like lay down the groups according to seeds and have like smashville be a default stage for everyone to use first game and just have everyone play each other at their own leisure for the pools. That way everyone gets at LEAST 4 games in, and then we could just take top 2 for a 16 people bracket to decide it overall or something. I could see that taking just as long as the 128 bracket tourney did even though its only 40 people though.