A handy excel sheet that lets you run tourneys from 8-64 players with ease!

Contains pairing shuffles that maximize player variety, minimize “bad schedules”, fairly determines starting winds, and keeps people from playing repeatedly on the same table.

Seeds an 8 person top cut, auto-determines standings, and more!

Click for the Tournament Helper .xls to run your own tournament!

“How did the shuffle of players get done?”

There are a number of priorities to consider, and deciding which takes precedence is important. The following things matter:

– players play as many different people as possible

– players do not play the same person very often

– a “Top Cut” is performed to pare to the higher-performing players

– those players are placed in heads-up positions to determine an ultimate winner

– the remaining players play against those of similar strengths to solidify positioning

The first issue is pairing players against each other in the “tournament scramble”. Unlike a strict up-down battle, we only have a small number of gamers to sort players. As such, playing against as many different people as possible is important, so that no one player gets games against “an easy group” or “a hard group”.

Next, players should not play each other multiple times. This is less possible than you’d think when multiple games are involved: In a 6-game tournament each player will play against 18 opponents. While this allows the setup to be that a large number of players play against 18 different people, this leaves a smaller group of people that play against a number of people many times. As such, it is important that there is not a lot of differnce between the player with the most number of different opponents and the player with the least – that instead of looking for the “most best”, you should instead look for the “least worst”.

Finally, a player should not play the same person a great number of times. This would give a stronger player the “best” chance of drawing points from the “weaker” player, to best help them in the overall tourney.

So, we did the following: We wrote a program that looks at hundreds of thousands of random tournament pairings per second, and then

returns the ‘best’ one. Our determination of ‘best’ is as follows, in descending priority:

– the lowest “maximum times any two players play each other”

– the lowest “difference between least and most number of different players played by any two players”

– the highest “most number of different players played by any one player”

Then, each set of four players per table were assigned winds across the rounds. Simulations were again run, with the following priorities:

– the lowest “number of players that do not ever play as a particular wind”

– the lowest “maximum number of a single wind played by any one player”

– the lowest “lateness of the player with the latest schedule”, where “latest” is defined as “the average of the wind of their rounds being as close to all last dealer as possible”

Lastly, the table numbers were run, with the following priorities:

– the least number of players that play on the same table on the same day more than twice in a row

– the least number of players that play on the same table on the same day twice in a row

Each “Player” in this case is a random number. People at events draw a random number to determine their relative order in a list, then that list is numbered 1 to the total number of persons, and that then denotes which “player” they are.

After this, we looked at how to “split” the playerbase. The WRC standard of 15/5 uma, after 6 games, we split the playerbase into “Top 8” and “Remaining”.

At this point, as players would be playing players of their own general standing, their total score at this point is halved. This allows the final games to matter more, and in some cases keeps “foregone conclusions” from happening (players so high or so low compared to others that their placement is already determined.

The Top 8 are now separate from the rest of the field – the lowest final ranking any of them can have is 8th, and the highest placement a non-current Top 8 player can have is 9th.

All intra-table seating (East/South/West/North) is now performed randomly at the table.

The Top 8 are seeded into 2 tables, 1st/3rd/6th/8th and 2nd/4th/5th/7th. The remainder of the field is placed at tables by current standing (9/10/11/12, 13/14/15/16, etc).

After this, The last games are determined as follows:

The top 4 scores of the Top 8 are placed at the Top 4 table. These players play, and they are 1st-4th place determined by final total points.

The bottom 4 scores of the Top 8 are placed at the 5th-8th table. These players play, and they are 5th-8th place determined by final total points.

The remainder of the field are again placed by current standing. Their final placements are determined by final total points, 9th onward (table 9/10/11/12 are not necessarily going to be 9th-12th).