Single elimination would allow significantly longer races thus eliminating much of the issues regarding luck winning out. This is how pro tennis and pro golf is played, to name a couple of big time match play sports. Do or die helps the drama factor.
Bowling is also match play, but only after qualifying rounds where everyone plays against the field (the USGA Amateur Championship is also played this way). I have theorized in other threads that having this sort of format in a pool event might be worth a try. For instance, everyone plays say 5-10 rounds of Fargo, Bowlliards or some similar game and the top however many get in to the match play (8/9/10 Ball or whatever). That should identify the best players that week regardless of how easy or hard the equipment is - this is essentially best out of 1,500 to 3000 possible points. The good thing about this is that seeding is not required and none of the amateurs go 2 and out. Everyone from the dead money to the world beaters get the same amount of play during qualifying. And the difficulty of the playing conditions don't become much of a factor because you are not competing directly against an opponent until match play where presumably it's all the top players left. It would be great for streaming too because if you have two players sharing a table alternating frames you could always put two monsters on the stream since there are no predetermined match ups. So as the qualifying progresses you could always put two of the leaders on the stream table. The 14.1 Challenges have a similar format where the high runs or totals in qualifying get into the match play.
As to seeding, it would certainly also help the top players make it to the end though this mainly eliminates the luck of the draw, not so much the luck inherent to the game or the conditions.
The problem with seeding is that in discussions around here it meets with stiff resistance for any event that's not all professional. Unfortunately at this point in time that is just about every tournament. I suppose in smaller field events (say 64 players) you could have seeding because you have a shot at getting 64 pros to fill the field or at least complete the field with a few hard core short stops willing to put up with the seeding. Once the field gets larger than that and the tournament is relying on dead money for a good portion of the purse, seeding might not work so well. And of course, at this point in time there is no real solid system for determining the seeds.
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