I had a very dumb idea recently and wanted some clarification about tiny tournaments.
Is there a minimum player requirement for an open tournament to be sanctioned? If I held an open tournament and only two players showed up, could I submit the tournament and would the results factor into the players rankings?
Is there a minimum player requirement for capped but open tournaments? For example there are many tournaments that are capped at 16, 32, 64, 128 etc, due to format or event space restrictions. Is it possible to run a sanctioned tournament that’s open, but capped at 8 players? 4 players? Two?
Look on the IFPA website, under Resources → WPPR Rules (v6.0).
In the Basic Rules section
" * There are no limitations to how many events any particular location or organizer can hold. For any tournaments submitted to the IFPA calendar as ‘private’ (address not listed publicly on our site), the IFPA requires a minimum of 16 players to attend for that tournament to be sanctioned for WPPR points. The IFPA now requires a full address in the calendar submission, and it is understandable for tournament directors to want to host IFPA sanctioned tournaments out of their homes and not have their full address made public. Any private tournament that fails to reach 16 players will not be sanctioned for WPPR points. An organizer is limited to hosting 4 ‘private’ tournaments per year for a given location. This rule does not apply to Women’s-only events."
Yeah I looked at that, however it’s referencing ‘private’ tournaments which are held at a private residence with the address not listed on the IFPA website. I’m talking about an open tournament at a public location.
I know there are sanctioned/ranked tournament results that are up on the IFPA site with less than 16 players as I’ve played in them
For public venues, I’d interpret it as: go nuts with your 2-player tournaments. It has to be at a public venue, with 30 days in advance posting to IFPA calendar. If you want to have preregistration, and capped at 2 players, that’s another 30 days prior. And you can’t hold any spots for yourself/anyone, because that would be in excess of 10% of the field.
Ah, I did find this:
“IFPA will not sanction events with less than 3 players. We also require that a single winner is determined for results to be accepted.”
Looks like 3 players is the tiniest tournament possible.
