Huh, I thought it made perfect sense. If two players are eliminated in the same round, one with a 5-3 record and the other with 4-3 and a bye, surely the 5-3 player deserves a higher rank?
If you remove the half-win option for byes Iāll just have to manually adjust the results.
Only problem I can think of is that itās not fair to give someone a lower rank as punishment for getting a bye, which they have no control over. If it really felt important to me to break a tie, Iād probably have a playoff.
Dang byes! Maybe it would be cool if you could have it group the bottom 3 in a round together, and only give the lowest score a strike. Or when there are only 3 people left with identical records, make them play as a 3 person group with the bottom score getting a strike.
Hear Hear! 
I wonāt remove the option if people are using it. I was going to check the database before removing, but you did my work for me. Iāll leave it as is 
This punishment is pretty small compared to the benefit of receiving a bye. A player with 4-3 and a bye will still be ranked higher than a player with 4-3 and no bye.
I like your idea of playing a 3-player game as an alternative to a bye.
love the MatchPlay software! i am now a subscriber. used it again for a Best Game/Launch Party last night and it worked great. the software is very intuitive for Scorekeepers, which as a TD saves me headaches.
my minor questions/suggestions/comments:
Player Names - a Playerās name was misspelled during registration and the only way to fix it was to Deactivate the Player and make a new player submission to the tournament. is that correct?
Vanity URL - noticed these are 1-time use only. would be nice to reuse the same vanity URL for a venue, location, name of tournament, etc.
Big Screen View - the ability to customize the Big Screen View would be the biggest improvement for me at this point. even though players can access scores via the MatchPlay Live site, it is nice to see āArenaā Scores listed on the big screen in a Qualifying/Best Game format, rather than simply point totals. This is even more relevant at a Launch Party where there is only 1 game being played.
for player names, you can actually go to the main page for the admin (not your tournament page) and click āPlayersā and edit there - thatās where you can add an IFPA # too (Iāve done lots of tournies with first timers, and after they are in IFPA I go in there to add their IFPA # so future submissions are easier to enter with the IFPA # already included)
Related, a good thing to do is if you have newbies (my focus is to bring in new players, personally), once the results hit IFPA, you can go in and look at who was listed as āNot Ratedā and then add in their IFPA # so if they show up at future events, since they are already in your login on MatchPlay their IFPA #s will be there. Not a necessary thing, but otherwise I used to forget until I had the results ready to submit to IFPA and then would add them in and re-generate the IFPA results. Iām just anal about keeping things in order up front so I do thisā¦
Gene already pointed you to the player edit area. I really need to get that edit button added on the tournament players screen as well.
Vanity URL: Thatās a great idea. Maybe just let you register a vanity URL for yourself so you can give people one URL and it lists all the tournaments you organize?
Big screen view: Making the big screen view more useful is right near the top of my todo list. There are so much potential there.
We are running a projector now. Would be great to squeeze everyone on the big screen view! (Within reason)
I run three-strikes knockout tournaments using random pairing. Iād save a significant amount of time if I could start a new round before the previous round was completed.
Is there any reason why this isnāt possible, at least for rounds 2 and 3, and any subsequent rounds where none of the pending matches involve players who risk elimination?
Thereās no reason other than me only having so many hours in the day and me having taken the easy road when I first implemented knockout tournaments.
Itās a great point. You should be able to draw the next round at any time as long as no players still playing are facing elimination.
The only problem is that most knockout tournaments also uses swiss pairing (people are paired with people who have the same amount of strikes). With swiss pairing itās never possible to start the next round since the pairings depends on the results from the current round. 
@haugstrup One thing Iād love to see at some point would be the option to either split the first stage in x groups or combine multiple turneys into a single playoff. So it would be possible to run 2 or 4 groups of swiss format head to head for qualifying and do a single papa style playoff with the top qualifiers from each group advancing.
Does that make sense?
@haugstrup: Thanks as always for the continued development you put into MatchPlay! With the IFPA SCS events coming up, Iām guessing there might be others (like me) who would like to use MatchPlay for tracking the bracket, recording results, and making results available online as they proceed.
Typically, Challonge has been used successfully in the past, but it has its limitations:
Doesnāt automatically generate Consolation Brackets for each round (only generates a 3rd place match). According to IFPA rules for this year, when players lose, they will continue playing others who lost in a similar round to determine final seeds. It would be nice to have a system that automatically generated the 9-16 Consolation Bracket, the 5-8 Consolation Bracket, and the match for 3rd place. MatchPlay currently generates a 4-player match for 5-8th position vs. a 2-round head-to-head bracket to determine 5-8th.
While Challonge allows for recording āsetsā so that you can record if someone won 4-2 or 4-0, etc, it doesnāt allow for recording what pins were played, and who won on each pin. The nerd inside of me would like to have the record of what pins were played, and who won on each one.
In Challonge, you donāt have the ability to add in players and Arenas from your catalog of each from prior tourneys run.
Any chance youād be willing to create a subset format from the current Single Elimination, called IFPA Single Elimination perhaps? And provide the option of whether Best 4 of 7, Best 3 of 5, or Best 2 of 3. And in the settings for each, match, allow for selecting multiple Arenas for each match. Not necessary to record each score, but just who won on each pin.
Thoughts?
It makes sense and if you think creatively itās almost there. If you setup a tournament series with a separate tournament for each group you can can the group section that way and still keep track of the overall standings.
Whatās left is already on my list, but not implemented yet: The ability to create a playoffs tournament based on a tournament series. Youād then pull in the top players from the group section into a new tournament for the playoffs.
Do you think that would be a direction that would work for you?
Iām not privy to the details of the format of the SCS events in 2016 so I may sound a little dumb here.
Best-of-X games: I agree that it would be nice to have the option to store results for each individual game in a best-of-x format. For Match Play to get there it will require some creative thinking when it comes to the database. MP assumes that every game scores points so to have a format where games donāt score points but a collection of games determine a single winner is a very different beast. Iād like to get there ā all Iām saying is that the work involved is more than it would appear on the surface.
MP can do the same thing you can do in Challonge of course. Use the āGame scoresā to enter ā4ā and ā2ā or whatever the number of wins are and MP will display those numbers on live standings. You can update those as the best-of-x progresses so keep people updated as the games move along.
Consolation brackets: Do you really mean that to determine 9th through 16th place IFPA is requiring people to create a fresh 8-player bracket and play it out? And for 5th through 8th a 4-player bracket should be created?
This would be very involved. Iām 100% sure I wonāt have time to do anything like that before February and Iām not even sure I want to get into it at all. Itās very complicated and I havenāt heard anyone else wanting to play that kind of format. To be honest Iād rather spend my time working on tournament formats that people play all year (e.g. double elimination brackets).
I think @pinwizj should simplify his tournament format 
You can of course fake it a bit in MP. Use the āclone tournamentā feature to quickly create new bracket tournaments using the same players and arenas and then deactivate the players you donāt need. And remember to change the bracket size before you start the consolation tournaments.
Yeah, that would eliminate a lot of the issues Iāve seen with other systems.
I havenāt tested this, but would it be possible to have the pools generated through a single list of participants and their ifpa rankings?
Yep . . . although every consolation match is a best-of-3 instead of a best-of-7.
We ran into a situation last year where some states did it, some states didnāt, then players werenāt aware that their state had a consolation bracket and left, blah blah blah.
So this year weāre making the players āplay it outā, and for any player not interested they can simply forfeit those matches and go home.
The TL:DR for anyone that didnāt follow that whole discussion on the interwebs ā another driving factor in requiring directors to provide the consolation tourney was so that a player didnāt get knocked out after one round after driving X hours to the tourney.
@haugstrup: I completely understand your thoughts on the ROI of your future work. Iām thinking that the consolation bracket can be managed fairly easily in the manner you described of running a separate new cloned event with the losers from each round.
And for the 5-8th bracket, we can simply use the 4-player match already built into MP to record the final results. Iām not so interested in memorializing the pins played/won in the consolation bracket.
So for my personal opinion, Iād prioritize the ability to capture the different arenas played/won in each āBest Of Xā match. But Iām completely ignorant to the behind-the-scenes work that would be required to do so.
Thanks as always for considering the input!
