You can already to this, but it’s perhaps not easy to see. Setup your tournament as a swiss match play tournament and play it out. Once you’re done with the swiss portion mark the tournament as complete by closing it.
Then you will see the option to “create finals”. This creates a single elimination bracket tournament for your finals. But you don’t have to play it as a single elim. bracket! Before starting this finals tournament go to edit the details. There you can change the format from a bracket to a knockout tournament.
@haugstrup I think for a lot of users it’s a bit confusing the first time when you click to “Close” the main part of the tourney. Since I’ve been using MP so much it’s second nature but I recall thinking, 'wait will this end the tourney and that’s it?" to myself originally. Maybe some better tips or description on it will help?
So when you look at the standings list and see a set of numbers like 4:17:24, the first number is the player’s total score, the second number is the sum of their opponents’ scores with the highest and lowest numbers removed, and the third number is the sum of all their opponents’ scores.
Super, thanks! This is useful for explaining to players why they are ranked lower than someone else when they have the same amount of points. I ended up using the feature yesterday rather than playing tiebreaker games, because a storm was approaching and we wanted to get done ASAP. But I didn’t have a good answer other than “It takes into account your score and your opponents scores”.
One nitpicky note around the tiebreaker numbers: Match Play doesn’t handle unplayed games the way the wikipedia page describes. I just never got around to figuring out how to handle unplayed games when players can be added to a tournament at any time. So head-to-head uses “Median” as described on the page with the exception of unplayed games by opponents not counting at all. That includes byes.
For four-player group play where a tiebreaker score which a bit more experimental. That tiebreaker score is the average of your opponents’ average score. The jury is still out on whether or not that’s useful.
I was trying to avoid this but I guess you would like feedback. I used Match Play to run two tourneys over the weekend. One went OK. The other went terribly wrong.
I ran tons of test tourneys to make sure I knew basically how it works. So at our GOT launch party we ran a 32 player single elim tourney. It was a comedy of errors. Someone took down a name wrong. So before I started the tourney I “disabled” that player. When I started the tourney that player was still in the bracket! I personally put my own name into the tourney. My name was clearly in the list. When I started the tourney my name was NOT in the bracket! Last but not least, I personally put the 32 players into the tourney, confirmed that they were all there. I then stood up in front of all these people and told them we were about to start the tourney. I look at the screen(using a Samsung Galaxy S5 phone) and it showed 11 players! I had to tell everyone to hold on and I would figure it out. To fix this I just closed out of Chrome altogether and reopened it, then logged onto Matchplay again and found all 32 players to be there.
The other tourney was the following day. 18 players, 2 strikes, head-to-head and it ran smoothly.
Yeah I could have swore I had entered a specific guy (as I only enter players once they pay) and then started the tourney and he wasn’t listed. I am not sure if it was pilot error on my side but was wondering if you use more than one device if things can get wonky. I mostly used the computer to run everything but later in the event I had to use my phone as well.
Phones can be tricky. Not everything is displayed on a phone screen. Especially in portrait orientation. It’s definitely optimized for iPads and computer screens.
We ran it for our golf and our 64 player 24 marathon tournament this weekend. 3 games a round. 4 player matchplay. 14 rounds. It ran great. No errors on the software side.
I like all feedback, thank you for sharing. I’m really sorry that a bug in MP made your first tournament a bad experience! I looked into what went wrong and made sure it can’t happen again.
Single elimination brackets are different than all the other tournament formats. In order to keep a bracket tournament moving MP will create new matches as soon as possible. This makes it possible to play matches in subsequent rounds without having to wait for all matches in the current round to finish. This is very useful for TDs but it also means that bracket tournaments use different code than other tournament formats.
Unfortunately, I had a bug where this different bracket tournament code path would not check a player’s status (active/inactive) when the tournament starts. The result is the bad situation that happened to you: A deactivated player is added to the tournament when it starts. And since a bracket tournament will never include more players than the bracket size it meant that the lowest seeded player would not be included.
If the deactivated player had been the lowest seed everything would have worked as intended.
Today I have made two changes to MP to avoid this situation in the future:
Deactivated players are never added to a bracket tournament. I could unify code between bracket and non-bracket tournaments so bracket tournaments now use the same code path as non-bracket tournaments
Deactivated players are shown as “greyed out” on the seeding page so a TD can easily identify deactivated players and move them to the bottom (if they want)
If you’re using multiple devices you should refresh your browser page when you switch between devices. Generally speaking you are not able to put your tournament in a bad state this way, but any changes you make on one device won’t show up on the other until you refresh the page.
One combo that I have found very useful is to use a computer/tablet for the tournament admin section and then use the scorekeeper interface on my phone. That way you you’re not tempted to do confusing things on the phone (disable arenas/players etc.) because the scorekeeper interface will only allow you to record results and nothing else.
If anyone is looking for a cheap tablet for running Match Play tournaments I can recommend the HP 7 G2 tablet ( http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=9SIA3FA2432794 ). It’s $80 and while the battery life isn’t impressive (charge before heading out, 5.5 hours battery life) it’s perfectly capable of running Chrome and Match Play.
The screen is smaller than an iPad mini, but again… $80. And it’s small enough to fit in your back pocket.
Used the software for the first time last week at a Best Game Qualifying/Launch Party event. This software definitely fills a void for me as a Tournament Director between Brackelope and Karl’s Never Drains Software. Really like the layout and the ability to use a laptop along with iPads. Consider me a subscriber.
Everything went very smoothly thanks to Andreas who answered lots of questions for me in advance of the event. Great customer service!
Some feedback (some of which has been provided to Andreas already):
Ability To Track Entries - the ability to sell entries and keep track of Players’ entries would be huge for smaller Qualifying Events/Launch Parties. I understand programming this is a bit of a task though.
Big Screen View - for me this is where some minor improvements would be a HUGE plus for the TD and end users. The ability to customize the Big Screen View display would be great. For the Launch Party (or any Qualifying Tourney for that matter) it would be nice to have the ability to show individual scores on games, rather than player point totals only. Also noticed the Queue listing displays Players’ “backwards” (bottom to top?) - the Big Screen View Queue List is not entirely intuitive as to who is currently active on the game and who is in line next. Also noticed that when bumping a player from the Queue (“Not Here?”) their name was not moved in the Big Screen View - this threw off the entire Queue display until we could get that player to play his game. Note that Scorekeepers can still log scores for ANY player in the Queue, so it didn’t hinder the ability for the tournament to continue in an orderly manner.
“Closing” Tournament to go to Finals/Playoffs - had I not read GeneX’s comment in this thread I probably wouldn’t have known to “close” the tournament to switch to the Finals bracket! A minor quibble.
Adding Players during Qualifying - I first made the tournament active early in the night (having only added 4 players) and was planning to register/add players as they arrived (remember this is a Launch Party). When I went to add the 5th player (and subsequent players thereafter) the software gives a warning that these players will not be added to the tournament until the next round! Almost had a heart attack thinking EVERY player would have to be added to the tournament prior to starting (this clearly wouldn’t work for a Qualifying event). Thankfully under Best Game the warning can be ignored and players may be queued up on a game right away as they are added. Again, a minor quibble but something that could be explained a little more in depth (ie. “if this is a Knockout tournament the Player will not be added until the next Round”).
Thanks for sharing all your feedback here as well, Monty
I wanted to pull out this quote because it brings up an interesting question for me. I was of the impression that only the large Best Game tournaments (e.g. PAPA circuit events) sell tickets etc. I thought that most smaller tournaments use a limited best game format where players pay once and get a fixed number of entries.
I didn’t add ticket selling/tracking to Match Play because a) it’s quite a bit of work and b) I thought it would wasted effort since the tournament who need to feature are already using Karl’s software (which excels at these large best game tournaments).
Are there many people out there who use the ticket selling format for their smaller events?
Tournament series are now available on Match Play Live: Players can see their standings in the progress and jump between tournaments in the series. Here’s an example - the monthly tournament series at Hi Life in Oakland: https://matchplay.events/live/series/5
Cloning tournaments and series! One of the advantages of Match Play is the many tournament options. You can configure your tournament exactly as you want. Unfortunately this can also mean a lot of clicking every time you create a tournament.
I realize that many people run the same format over and over and the clicking if boring. So now you can clone your existing tournaments. Cloning creates an exact copy of an existing tournament – you can even copy over players, arenas and scorekeepers! After cloning you just need to edit the date of your new tournament and you’re good to go! Couldn’t be simpler.
