@umbilico
I organize pinball tournaments almost since 20 years now.
We played already swiss long time before it was played in the US. It was Minimum 2007 (And already real swiss without duplicate opponent)
I played IFPA World championships till 2013 and remenber when Top Player in the world playd first time Swiss in Germany, they liked it .
As till last year we needed only 17 Rounds + Finals for 100% TGP I never tried with much more rounds.
In march will be first tournament which I organize with 40-44 Players to reach 180% so 36-38 Round MM Saturday and Finals on Sunday.
Next Friday will test again with 15-20 players and will use the trick to change “max simultan Games” that in end I hope all will be ended smothy this time
17 rounds Swiss is fine for 40 players, 37 rounds isn’t. Just so you know what I’m talking about, consider a tournament with 6 players, and the following pairings in the first 3 rounds:
Round 1: 1 vs 4, 2 vs 5, 3 vs 6
Round 2: 1 vs 5, 2 vs 6, 3 vs 4
Round 3: 1 vs 6, 2 vs 4, 3 vs 5
Round 4: ?
You’re going to find that it’s impossible to avoid repeat pairings in round 4.
Swiss isn’t made for running “almost round robins”. The closer you get to a round robin, the more likely it is you’re going to run into a situation like the above, where you can’t avoid a repeat pairing. I mean, Matchplay will let you do that, but then technically that’s not Swiss anymore.
So, just run MM for those “almost round robins”, and you’re gonna be fine.
It is not like you write,
we played already with 20 Players 17 rounds no duplicate.
Swiss try to find players which have similar points, but if it dont find same points it takes next oponent which is nearest possible
Anyway you misunderstand. I switch from Swiss to MM next tournament
If it’s not like I write, tell me the Round 4 pairings in my example then.
Of course it’s possible to play 17 rounds with 20 players without duplicates, that’s not the point. The point is, it’s also possible to run into a situation where duplicates can’t be avoided. And since having no duplicates is one of the two main rules that define what a Swiss tournament is, Swiss is not well suited for this sort of setup.
40 players 17 rounds strictly swiss
sure also no duplicate if it would be expand to 35 rounds
you missunderstand pairings in swiss. It will always find next possible opponent which you did not played against. (Will chust try to find the one which is closest to your points)
https://next.matchplay.events/tournaments/71008/stats
anyway we dont need to diskuss anymore.
I will stop running swiss , round robin and frenzy and using MM
Sure. You sound pretty convinced it’s impossible to be forced into repeat pairings when running a large number of rounds. You know what would convince me? If you told me a valid Round 4 pairing in my example above.
@umbilico maybe you are right. I dont want to spent my time now to create swiss game with 6 players to simulate and find out if it works or not. In theorie if round robin works with 6 also swiss should work with 6
I just wrote about my experience. I never had duplicate in swiss
but I had never Games aprox amount of players.
and if MM works well also in the end I dont have any reason to play swiss
It has always been my understanding that “true Swiss” tournaments work as @pinmanic says. The rule is that you always play the opponent with the closest record to yours that you have not yet played. In this way it tries to approximate a round robin as well as possible. When the number of rounds reaches the number at which everyone plays everyone, it is now identical with a round robin. I have a tournament I run every year that is intended to be a round robin, but in reality I know that will take too long, so I run it as a tournament with Swiss pairings that runs until a certain time, in order to get an “almost round robin.” I have used Challonge to do this in the past specifically because it handles Swiss in the way pinmanic describes; it will not duplicate opponents until everyone has played everyone. It was my understanding that “strict Swiss” also does this in Matchplay, but I could be wrong as I have not used Matchplay to run my pseudo-round-robin since it introduced strict Swiss (as opposed to what Matchplay’s original “Swiss” which isn’t actually Swiss).
“Strict Swiss” (or “actual Swiss”, as I prefer to call it) does do that, but as I said, there are situations in which repeat pairings cannot be avoided, and the closer you get to round robin, the higher the probability for that.
If you do an actual round robin, you’re defining all the parings for the whole tournament in advance, so no problem there. In Swiss, parings obviously depend on game results, so you’re not in control and can’t prevent the tournament from running into a dead end at some point.
I sound like a broken record at this point, but if you’re sure dead ends are not possible, and want to convince me, too, just show me how Round 4 in my example above works out with no repeat pairings.
I would love for this not being the case, because the whole point of Swiss is approximating the results of a round robin by skipping all the pairings for which the outcome seems obvious. So, how cool would it be if you’d be guaranteed to actually reach a round robin if you play enough rounds. You’re not, though.
MM doesn’t have this problem, because there are no rounds. In case there are no unique pairings available for a player, you can just wait until there are, guaranteeing that you’re able reach a round robin at some point.
If you really do want to play Swiss “almost round robins”, Matchplay is actually your best choice of software, because in case of a dead end, it will just give you repeat pairings instead of erroring out, as other Swiss apps might. That was originally done so the “Strict Swiss” pairing algorithm can also be used for Knockouts, but I guess it might be useful here, too.
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Obviously I have to think it through more carefully. It’s not immediately obvious to me why that would happen, but I haven’t studied your example closely enough. It’s never come up for me in several years of running a tournament that way with Challonge. Edit to add: I am actually planning to use Max Matchplay to run my pseudo-round-robin this year so that’s good to know.
It’s easy to see if you look at it like that:
There are basically two groups of players,
Group A: players 1, 2, 3
Group B: players 4, 5, 6
After 3 rounds, everyone in group A has played against everyone in Group B, so in round 4, both Group A and Group B players are forced to play against somebody from their own group. Since there’s 3 players in each group, that’s not possible, though.
I don’t think this sort of thing is actually likely to happen in a long running Swiss tournament, but it’s definitely possible. Since in those situations, there’s a choice to be made which players get a repeat pairing, the way “Strict Swiss” handles this in Matchplay is give repeat pairings to the lowest ranked players, so it doesn’t lose ranking resolution in the top end.
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Yes, I get it now. In the past I had naively assumed that however many rounds you ran, you would just get partway through a round robin, but with the more useful matches prioritized. I see now that the way that Swiss does pairings, because it disrupts the methodical order of a round robin, can have this result. It had just never come up for me and I hadn’t thought of it happening.
I do like that MM with strict Swiss can do a better job of approximating round robin, and that’s going to be my format for my next round robin. Heck, since MM does matches so much more efficiently, I might be able to run an actual complete round robin for the first time!
there’s actually a formula for the optimal number of rounds in Swiss System:
R ≈ 0,2·T + 1,4·n (always round up)
R: #rounds
T: #participants
n: #spots you want to play out
f.e with 32 participants and 4 players qualifying for the finals 12 rounds are optimal.
In other words the first and last 4 players in the standings are placed “correctly” after 12 rounds, all others aren’t yet.
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I used Match Play challenge in 2019 against friends for multiple reasons.
Sometimes we could not finish our 7 game series in a single night, so it was a great way to keep track of who won.
We also enjoyed that ratings were affected by this.
MP challenges are a great way to track grudge and money matches as well. Please consider keeping it for Next.
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Feedback on the WPPR estimator.
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First of all, I love it! It’s super fast and it already knows what tournament I’m looking at. While I loved to use the chunkout one, those are two killer improvements right off the bat.
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Add my vote to the request to let organizers set the default value to show to users. I think it would be nice to still let anyone override that to keep it flexible though. It’s more important to let the player enter in the TGP they want to see, but if you can also let the organizer supply the default that’s a big improvement.
On top of that, I think it’s actually an important feature. I’ve asked local players what they think of the feature and they’ve told me they love it because they get to see the points they can get. These are players who are excited to get 0.4 WPPRs. But they don’t really understand TGP. So I worry that their excitement about the feature will turn to disappointment when they realize they’re getting half of the predicted WPPRs for a tournament with an actual TGP of 48%.
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I’d love to see you incorporate the standings from the playoffs into the WPPR Distribution table! I’ve always found it frustrating that there’s nowhere to see the standings from qualifying and finals combined. I understand that you can’t just replace the playoff standings with info from the finals; but this seems like the perfect place to put a combined view.
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It’d be nice for it to account for ties. I see that you have a banner with a note about this. Ties are something that the IFPA has a clear algorithm for, but it’s not intuitive (in my opinion). So if you are able to incorporate ties into this feature it’d be pretty valuable by showing how they work. Tie rules are summarized here.
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You currently list these stats at the top of the page:
- WPPR value
- TGP percentage
- Players
I propose changing the order and the phrasing to:
- Players
- TGP percentage (estimated by TD)
- WPPR value for 1st
The order implies cause and effect. Players are who showed up, there’s not much control over that. TGP is sometimes influenced by player count (e.g. strikes formats). WPPRs is influenced by both player count and TGP. All three fit above the fold, so I think it’s still ok to list WPPRs last even though it’s the most important of the three. Obviously only include “(estimated by TD)” if you go with the first feature suggested in this post and if the TD has provided a value. “For 1st” is just to help clarify how that is used for players who are new to thinking about tournament points value.
And just to reiterate, if you don’t make any of these changes it’s still a great feature.
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I just want to say these table sorts are awesome.
Sorting by Seed makes things so much easier for me for Activating/Deactivating
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How do you find nearby locations on the new version?
And why can’t 2 TDs use the same location on either version? They each have to create the same location, so it shows up twice in the nearby locations (on the old version).
We are in the midle of a MM Match
https://next.matchplay.events/tournaments/94764
I just saw that “max active games” is maximum 10" So with 28 Players to use this “trick” is useless right?
So I can use that to change max active games maybe in the End of the tournament right?
Any reason why it is only 10 games maximum?
For me for a Tournament with more than 24 Players it makes no sense
Are you saying that when max games is set to no limit it only creates 10? Or are you wishing there was a way to create a limit higher than 10?
I have always used the limit to create a bit of a queue, but my group is between 20 to 26 for most of our weekly leagues running this format.
I mean, wishing there was a way to create a limit higher than 10
we were 30 player not 28 just 2 left the tournament as it took much more time than expected.
maxgames with 10 if you are 30 players steals a lot of time.
@haugstrup is there any chance that in next 4 weeks the possible amount of “max active games” will be increased?
Out of my experience, 10 is good if you run tournaments up to 24 Players.
But with 40 people, I fear to risk.
In tournaments, I organize we “have good players but we have also beginners”. So the difference of completed games per player is much bigger than if you have “good players and average players”.
Does anyone have experience with max matchplay with more than 40 Players and more than 30 rounds?