With Pinburgh just over I figured that some people might be interested in running their own Pinburgh-style tournaments locally. I wrote a short guide on how to set such a tournament up using Match Play Events here: https://matchplay.events/tournaments/pinburgh
In San Francisco @JimiWolf and @echa usually setup their tournaments slightly different than what I describe in the guide. They usually stick to one game per round – I think because it’s easier to remove long playing or broken down games (no team of PAPA techs ready to fix machines!)
I would totally run tournaments as you describe in the guide if I had a location capable of supporting them! One game per round is definitely not as cool as playing through banks of machines, but it is easier to accommodate.
Mostly I’m just commenting though to say how awesome MatchPlay is and if you run events or want to run events and haven’t played with it yet, you should carve out time in your schedule to try it immediately. I strongly prefer to run non-elimination tournaments so that all levels of players have equal opportunity to enjoy the event, but until recently doing so took so much work to run it wasn’t practical to do regularly. @haugstrup’s software makes it a breeze!
I ran a Pinburgh style tournament ealier this year and would like to point out a lesson I learned.
When running it on a much lower scale I recommend not having fixed game banks. Chances are that some players will have to play the same four games over and over again. Instead I will suggest making game classes. Like Stern, 90’s widebody, 90’s and pre-90’s. Or just 1, 2, 3 and 4. And then create new game banks for each round by picking one game from each class out of a hat.
This is waaay late, but it shouldn’t be too hard to try to avoid this happening in code. As long as the event is too big, the SAT problem shouldn’t be too hard…