I’m not sure if I got/expressed it right - with the formula you don’t know exactly how many losses can be taken at the start of the tournament, but you know how many rounds you have to play, that it shows the first x places (your finalists) more or less correct.
Reasons I don’t like Swiss pairings:
- The top group takes longer to complete games/round and slows the tournament up
- Weak players continue to play with weak players. I prefer weak and strong players to be mixed up so the stronger player can help the weak player or the weak play can watch and learn.
Ill continue to use Balanced pairings with matchplay.events .
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Zen, point 1 I agree with but point 2 I don’t see it that way. The stronger players need the stronger competition or they often will just run away with it. Also the weaker players will eventually move up and catch a stronger player on the way down so you still get that mix. Our league uses FSPA rules which bubbles players similarly to Swiss pairing. Everyone that plays in our league really likes that aspect of it.
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I am thinking of running a head to head tournament, swiss tiered, with 20-30 players. No finals, we just play say 10 rounds, best of 3 games. Does this sound like it would work? To me it seems a valid IFPA tournament, too?
Is it possible to add players who arrive late, awarding them losses in the rounds they missed?
Sounds like a great tournament to me. It’s most certainly a valid IFPA tournament.
If you’re using Match Play you can add players any time. Since standings are calculated based on “wins” you don’t have to do anything other than add them to the tournament. The late arrival will have 0 wins and will be at the bottom of the standings.
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I thought a tournament had to include a playoff where max 50 % advance to get tgp for the qualifying games? Unless its knockout of course.
Playoffs are only required for formats that don’t have a “direct play” portion for their qualifying.
Swiss is “direct play” from the start, so this is fine for IFPA purposes.
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Exactly. Direct play throughout the tourney does not require any kind of finals or playoffs. We have done a couple tourneys like this. Groups of 4(3 where necessary), Swiss pairing, balanced bank draws, IFPA scoring. The 1st one we did we had 5 rounds of 4 games(20 games total, 40 games for TGP). The 2nd tourney we changed to 6 rounds of 3 games(18 games total, 36 games for TGP). This worked much better. The complaint we got from the rounds of 4 games was that with IFPA scoring(7,5,3,1) there was potential for too great a points swing within a single round(Max score 28 vs. Min. score of 4, difference of 24 pts). With 3 games per round the points swing possible within a round was Max score 21 vs. Min score 3, difference of 18 pts.
Reading my own description, we might try this next time as 8 rounds of 2 games. Max score 14 vs. min score 2, difference of 12 points. We would still play a total of 16 games, 32 for TGP purposes. The only thing to consider is the time between rounds. The more rounds you have, the more time that is taken up between rounds, making up score sheets, announcing the groups, etc.
Besides too great a points swing with 4 games per round, changing to 3 per round also affords you more rounds… and the more rounds the better when it comes to Swiss. There’s a calculation out there on the minimum # or rounds mathematically required for X # of players, but I don’t have it handy. And I believe it’s basis is 1v1 matches, single game.
For head-to-head games the required number of games in a swiss tournament is the binary log of the number of players (rounded up). Most pinball tournaments play far more rounds than this though (32 players only requires 5 rounds to find a winner).