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: That’s 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. I’d 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 isn’t possible, at least for rounds 2 and 3, and any subsequent rounds where none of the pending matches involve players who risk elimination?
There’s 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.
It’s 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 it’s never possible to start the next round since the pairings depends on the results from the current round. 
@haugstrup One thing I’d 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, I’m 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:
Doesn’t 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 “sets” so that you can record if someone won 4-2 or 4-0, etc, it doesn’t 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 don’t have the ability to add in players and Arenas from your catalog of each from prior tourneys run.
Any chance you’d 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 it’s 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.
What’s left is already on my list, but not implemented yet: The ability to create a playoffs tournament based on a tournament series. You’d 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?
I’m 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 don’t score points but a collection of games determine a single winner is a very different beast. I’d like to get there – all I’m 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 “Game scores” to enter “4” and “2” 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. I’m 100% sure I won’t have time to do anything like that before February and I’m not even sure I want to get into it at all. It’s very complicated and I haven’t heard anyone else wanting to play that kind of format. To be honest I’d 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 “clone tournament” feature to quickly create new bracket tournaments using the same players and arenas and then deactivate the players you don’t need. And remember to change the bracket size before you start the consolation tournaments.
Yeah, that would eliminate a lot of the issues I’ve seen with other systems.
I haven’t 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 didn’t, then players weren’t aware that their state had a consolation bracket and left, blah blah blah.
So this year we’re making the players ‘play it out’, and for any player not interested they can simply forfeit those matches and go home.
The TL:DR for anyone that didn’t follow that whole discussion on the interwebs — another driving factor in requiring directors to provide the consolation tourney was so that a player didn’t 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. I’m 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. I’m not so interested in memorializing the pins played/won in the consolation bracket.
So for my personal opinion, I’d prioritize the ability to capture the different arenas played/won in each “Best Of X” match. But I’m completely ignorant to the behind-the-scenes work that would be required to do so.
Thanks as always for considering the input!
Last year we ran 2-4 player matchplay groups of 4 games for 9-16 with our league point system 5/3/2/1 and a single 4 player matchplay group to determine 5-8. Is that not acceptable this year? Does it have to be consolation bracket with the same format? 3/4 did a best of 5 match
Not acceptable this year 
We’re now fully by the book, consistent across all States to run things the exact same way.
Alright. Thanks for the clarification. Hadn’t had time to read any changes on scs rules yet.
Unfortunately not. For that I would have to implement the tournament type properly. It’s a fun format so I might give it a go in the new year 
I’ll let it stew in the back of my mind for a while. It’s a feature that would be generally usable for every tournament director, which is always appealing. Just have to figure out how to do it best
Shh, don’t tell him and you’ll be fine! 
Josh made a critical mistake: In having all state finals happen on the same day he can’t visit each state and make sure the rules are followed!
Ran another group knockout format tonight at our “Weekly Wizard” tournament. The vibe seemed to be a little better than with our usual head-to-head knockouts, which seems to be the norm for group formats. The only complaint was again the 3 player groups giving the bottom 2 players a strike. With 21 players, that meant 3 straight rounds of brutality for the 9 players at the bottom.
Might be nice if in that situation (player count is a multiple of 4 plus 1 player), one player gets a bye, and everyone else plays in 4-person groups. In the instance where there is a multiple of 4 plus 2 players, have a 2-player group at the bottom.
I have no idea how difficult something like this would be to implement, but from the feedback I’ve received, the 3-player group thing is really the only complaint. I know that I could kind of solve this problem if I didn’t use swiss seeding, but with 21 players this event already went about 3 hours, which is about the maximum I think regular attendees should expect to commit to this weekly.
Thanks for your time! One nice thing was that I was able to run our “Weekly Lizard” (2 round matchplay tourney for people knocked out before round 5) in a separate tab on my iPad, and all ran quite smoothly. The Weekly Lizard contestants agreed that they’d like it to run 3 rounds in the future.
I’ll make it configurable how many strikes are awarded to three-player groups. I firmly believe that two strikes is the right amount of strikes, but other TDs are equally adamant that one strike is the right amount.
The group generation code is shared between all group tournaments so it won’t be possible for to change how many three-player groups are created. 
Being able to run multiple tournaments by just opening a new browser tab is one of my favorite features