Trying to plan my first tournament. Here is the general plan
24 participants
4 player match play scored 3/2/1/0
First 8 to get to 18 points make it to the finals
Semi finals will be 2 groups of 4, playing a total of 3 machines per group
Finals will be 1 group of 4 playing 3 machines
The tentative game list is: woz, tspp, rs, tz, pm, tav
Anyone have an estimate on how long this will take?
I’ve never heard of a format like this. You’ll have six foursomes staying together the whole time? So, you might win your group but not advance to the finals because other people got to 18 points first?
Let’s say you have an unbalanced group and they end up: 18, 12, 6, 0. What does the person in first place have to play for anymore since they’re in the finals? Do they drop out of the group and you do different scoring for the rest? Do they just keep going with nothing to play for?
I’d guess it’s going to take 9 or 10 rounds for you to get 8 players with 18 points. Given that you only have 6 machines, that means a round can’t end until the longest playing game is over. That could be 30 or 40 minutes.
I think you’re looking at 6 or 7 hours before you even reach the finals. Semis and finals will be roughly 1.5 hours each. So…10 hours (without breaks) assuming that no machines go down?
If I were you, I would consider other options for a format.
I’d suggest to have each group play each machine exactly once. At that point, the person with the highest score in each group advances to the finals, plus two “wild card” players (the two non-winners with the highest point totals overall).
Even this might be a little long. It’s going to be clear to some people that they cannot win their group after just an hour, but they’ll have three more hours to go before they can leave.
I based this format off of this
http://www.iepinball.com/index.php?p=patl
Basically each round you would play 1 four player game. The next round you would be in a new group of 4. Once someone reaches 18 pts they no longer play, if there is an odd number of people there would be some 3 player groups.
Ah, got it.
That clears up the confusion about when to stop, but it’s still going to be a 10+ hour tournament.
10+hours? You hand out 1.5pt/player/game. Worst case scenario is 12 games and a huge tie, expectation is probably a good few rounds less than that (best case scenario is 7). Then six more 4-player games for finals.
Note that you’ll be waiting on your slowest game every round. Budget for, say, 10x 4-player games + finals on that game at the speed you expect the players that turn up to play. If that’s too long, turn down the point threshold.
I estimate 4 hours for 1st round. 1.5 hours each for rounds 2 and 3. That’s 7 hours. I like to add a +10% factor for malfunctions, rulings, etc. So 7Hr 45 min is a close guess.
The main issue is how to deal with 3 players groups. A couple suggestions.
It’s difficult to get a # of players divisible by 4. Even if you start out with 24, someone may have to leave, or in your format players will drop once they reach 18 points. I recall reading about this or similar format and I really like the idea.
Since each group in the qualifying rounds only plays 1 game I was thinking of doing 3 player groups as 3/2/1
TSPP and OZ can have long ball times. I would suggest enlisting a good (experienced) setup guy to help you. If you’re using a public location and don’t have keys to the games, that’s gonna be tough for match play if the games play long.
But then you have 8 groups of 3, and only six machines. People will have to wait until other groups are done before they can even start. This isn’t going to speed things up at all (unless you add 2 more machines).
That’s a good point. If you can’t turn off extra balls, I would raise time estimates by 25-50%.
Would you consider making people play to 9 or 10 points? That would make this format sound significantly more appealing to me.
I don’t think he meant 8 groups of 3. I believe he meant IF there were any groups of 3.
If you do 3,2,1 for groups of three, it could be perceived as an advantage to be in a 3 player group. Why? That’s 6 points divided by 3 players = 2 points per player up for grabs. 3,2,1,0 in a 4 player group = 1.5 points per player up for grabs. I know it seems like a small difference but believe me, someone will probably complain about it.
Correct. I will do groups of 4 when possible.
Yeah I can see that but any scoring system I could think of would either give a small advantage or disadvantage to groups of 3. I decided to go this route as it was similar to what they did at MPE
After each game, the players are re-seeded? Or do groups play more than one game together? What do you score when there are 3-player groups? (There will be, once the first person makes it to 18, they’ll stop playing.)
Except the average round to take 45 minutes, including the gameplay and reseeding.
To get 8 players to 18 will probably take ~10 rounds (averaging 1.8 points per round for 8th place out of 24).
10 rounds @ 45 minutes / round = 7.5 hours
Your semi and finals format are standard PAPA, and those rounds are blocked for 2 hours each.
Total time: 11.5 hours
In that case, @kdeangelo is here, he probably can recall how long it took.
FYI in public locations, have players plunge extra balls and it won’t add much time to the event.
Yes, they are re-seeded
3/2/1
Nah, lots of ways to make it fair. 7-5-3-1 / 7-4-1 (avg = 4) and 5-4-2-1 / 5-3-1 (avg = 3) are two viable scoring solutions. I definitely agree with @LOTR_breath that you should normalize the scoring so the average pts/player/game is uniform across all groups regardless of size.
Or consider allowing a single EB to be played, with others plunged… IMHO this adds a significant amount of strategy to the game without making things drag on too long.