Tournament types?

[JSchmidt]

I'm working on a small app to organize taikai's with and just want to check that I got the basics covered.
Sofar, I've seen 3 types of first round matches:

3-man/team pools (Seems to be the most common)

Straight knockout. (When you are really in a hurry)

Staggered knockout (first 2 guys fights, winner meets 3rd guy, that winner goes to 2nd round).


Any other common combinations I'm missing out on?

Jakob

[Neil Gendzwill]

The staggered knock-out only occurs when the number of entrants isn't an exact power of 2. It's not really a different style.

The pools usually feed a straight elimination in one of two styles: only pool winners advance, and winners of each pool play loser from the opposite side in the first round.

Another tournament style is complete round-robin. In that case it would be necessary to keep track of all the matches and who scored on who in order to produce the final ranking.

I've never seen it in kendo but double elimination is a possibility.

I've thought of creating an app like this before. Here are some features I've thought of:

1. Manual draws.

2. Random draws.

3. Seeded draws - place people so that if the seeds are strictly correct, the #1 and #2 seed play each other in the final. An 8-person draw would look like this in the first round:

1v8 4v5 2v7 3v6

If you do it in pools, usually it's a top seed, a middle seed and a bottom seed together.

Allow for multiple people seeded at the same level (for seeding by rank).

4. Mixture of manual, random and seeded - allow for manual positioning of some people and automatic fill-in by seed or by random draw of the rest.

5. Where possible in seeded or automatic mode, make sure people from the same club don't meet in the first round (or however many subsequent rounds you can look ahead). When combined with the seeding, this may be a pretty tough problem.

6. Track points, penalties, match time and winners in real time. Allow for multiple court managers to enter updates into a central database.

7. Track which court each match is played on.

8. Allow manual intervention to fix the initial draw if it's not quite right, allow for no-shows and extras etc. Allow reassigning matches to other courts while the tournament is in progress

9. Drive one electronic scoreboard for each court. Show who is currently playing, what the score is including penalties, time remaining. Show who's on deck on that court (maybe the next two matches).

[JSchmidt]

I haven't thought of seeded draws..I'll have a look into that. I would be tempted to limit the amount of seeded people to the amount of pools and randomly draw the rest.

"5. Where possible in seeded or automatic mode, make sure people from the same club don't meet in the first round"

This I disagree with..That defeats the whole purpose of a random draw.

" 6. Track points, penalties, match time and winners in real time. Allow for multiple court managers to enter updates into a central database."

First bit, sort of, second bit means I have to get into database-stuff, which I got absolutly no intention of doing. (I'm not a programmer..I just dabble with it).

Jakob

[Neil Gendzwill]

Originally posted by JSchmidt

"5. Where possible in seeded or automatic mode, make sure people from the same club don't meet in the first round"

This I disagree with..That defeats the whole purpose of a random draw.
Make it an option. For most friendly tournaments though you want to avoid same club matchups for as long as you can. People aren't going to enjoy their match if they lose to some guy in their own club in the first round.

Random draws suck in general but I concede that it would be a requested feature.

Oh and the real-time entry from multiple court terminals plus driving displays is probably best left to the commercial version...

You might want to do a little web search for existing tournament software. There's a few packages out there for ball tournaments and such that might give you a few ideas. They tend to support pretty complex draws that don't apply for kendo, where every team gets multiple chances to get back in it or win a consolation flight or some such.

[slidercrank]

4-men round robin.

For A, B, C and D:

Match 1: A vs B
Match 2: C vs D

Match 3: winner of 1 vs loser of 2
Match 4: loser of 1 vs winner of 2

Match 5: winner of 3 vs winner of 4

If time allows, this grouping lets everyone fight at least twice.

[Curtis]

We use double elimination in a couple of our tournaments for the kids, 15 and under.

Most of our tournaments are a combination of drawing and seeding. First split up the clubs among the brackets and then draw the names to fill in slots. Then check to see if all the top people have been placed in one section. If so then change it around some. For the kyu it can be a hit and miss.

[Sir Percy]

A fellow in my fencing club wrote a palm application called Palmfencer (http://www.handango.com/PlatformSearch.jsp?siteId=1&jid=38DFB9DXBAX9E4X49EA39C4827CX1332&txtSearch=palmfencer&optionId=1_1_2&platformId=1). Works great for fencing (pools and DE). Haven't tried it on kendo though.