I’d like to run a group matchplay tournament (groups of 4) for the first time and I’m not sure if my ideas are possible.
Michael
Anything is possible. 
You decide the rules of your tournament. Your players decide if they like those rules and wish to participate.
You don’t mention the scoring rules for your heads-up matches, which would of course be critical. You also don’t mention the criteria by which you transition from heads-up to finals format. Keep in mind that you may have qualifying ties for the finals, so you need to have tie-breaking rule(s) in force, as well as rules for how finalists advance to the next round once they’ve made the finals.
don’t get me wrong, but your answer didn’t help me at all.
I try to be clearer:
I’ve run tournaments since years (even before the IFPA revived) in various different formats, it’ just the first time I’d like to hold a groupmatchplay tournament with matchplay.events.
That’s why I didn’t mention these criterias, they are clear to me and totally irrelevant to the questions I have.
Back to my questions: is it possible with matchplay.events? can I change the settings while the tournament is running?
No to both questions unfortunately.
Yes. Run the two game round then just make sure that for TGP reasons you are reporting that they only played one game instead of two.
thanks, this helps. What a bummer I can’t change the settings. I’ll think about how I’ll solve this issue - swiss from the beginning/balanced to the end/or start with balanced and running the last round analogue on sheets…
I’d be interested to see what you come up with. Would love this type of option in the future for matchplay too.
When you get to finals clone the event. You can change the format of the cloned event before it starts.
Run the first five rounds as one tournament. Then create a playoff/finals tournament for the last round. For the finals tournament change your setting to whatever you want. Should be perfectly doable
sounds good, just one last question (I think).
by cloning the event does it migrate everything (I mean besides the obvious ones like standings and points particularly the memory which games everybody played)? so by drawing arenas/machines balanced the previous rounds matter.
No. It will only clone the arenas and players.
See Chuck’s reply. I recommend you run some test tournaments to get a good idea of how Matchplay works if you try new things. Otherwise you’re guaranteed to have something you didn’t expect and at minimum you’ll create a delay, at worst you’ll need to switch to alternative record keeping mid-event.
Have a plan and test it.
ok, it seems there are some misunderstandings. by final round (11) I mean the final round of qualification and not the finals. My aim is to create for the final round of qualification the ‘pressure’ like pinburgh and IFPA does, but for the first 10 games as many different opponents as possible. As I understood now, cloning the event doesn’t help me at all, because I would need at least the actual standings and points to continue qualification. Of course testing is planned, but I only want to test things which are possible (and that’s why I started this thread).
finals I will run on paper as always - easier, smoother and quicker.
I think the suggestion was to use the matchplay “finals” feature as your last round of qualifying. It was a workaround for your format-- the terminology is not going to match what you are trying to do exactly.
Another strategy would be to create a two event “Series” in matchplay. The first event will be for your initial balanced rounds, and your last event will be for your adjascent pairing round. This will add all players points into a single value at the end. The snag is you’ll need to manually add and seed everyone for your final round. If you’re crafty, you could work out a script or workflow to use the batch player add feature and make this go pretty quickly.