Best Tournament Software?

General
21

That’s great we run our local monthly tournament on bravkelope.

22

My/FSPA’s League Manager system (used by ~25 leagues) could potentially be used to run match-play tournaments. In particular, it should work pretty well for formats that are similar to Pinburgh (which is basically a league season smashed into a weekend). Andy Rosa used the system last year to run his Pinbowl tournament.

23

Is there any software yet for managing Pingolf tourneys? As far as I’ve been able to determine, most people just use a spreadsheet, but I figured I’d ask anyway since this nice thread about software popped up.

Thanks,

Ray

24

We have been using @Adam’s software at the PinCrossing as well and have found it effective and reliable. I’m planning to use it for the Allentown tournaments.

25

@joe we have been loving your league software in New England. It worked wonderfully last season in its new incarnation.

I’m very excited about this new match play software. Can’t wait to test run it at The Sanctum.

1 Like
26

I use Scott Danesi’s Arcade Tournament Manager for our tournaments. You can setup the software for IFPA scoring. It’s the only one I knew of besides Bracketlope and haven’t seen any others published for use.

http://www.scottdanesi.com/?page_id=161

I also use Bracketlope for Knockout Tournaments.

Tom.

1 Like
27

While tournament software is helpful when running events that match other known events, it doesn’t help as much if you want to try custom formats. For that, I turn to Excel. It works quite well. I even go to the point of recording all scores for archival reasons (players do like that) even though not necessary.

Here are a couple of examples.
Match Play tournament, 88 players:
http://nwpas.wapinball.net/live/index.html

WA State Championships (best-of-7 rounds)
http://ifpa.wapinball.net/2014-IFPA-SCS-WA/wa-bracket.htm
http://ifpa.wapinball.net/2014-IFPA-SCS-WA/wa-summary.htm

Fraser Valley Flip Out
http://fvfo.wapinball.net/

And just last week, one of our locals who did not have brackelope but found themselves needed to run the 3-strike tournament, used Excel to run that tournament.

Anyone with average to better Excel skills can do this. Only the FVFO qualifying used macros; everything else was simple cell math.

I’m not saying this is best way; I’ll take Karl’s software for running a HERB tourney over excel any day (e.g. FVFO should be moving to Karl’s software next year, if appropriate software updates are made in time). But it is an option when you don’t have the software you need to do what you want to do.

1 Like
28

I can vouch that Excel is an option. We ran the first couple Rose City Showdown tournaments with Excel (HERB style tourney). And we had a macro that exported/uploaded the files to html on our server, so people could check their scores. It worked well. These days I much prefer Karl’s software, though.

29

I really liked this for the March Madness tournament in Vegas. Very clean design, simple and fun for 4 player match play and everyone was able to access on their phones for quick reference.

Looking forward to using it for local events when @ClevelandPinball gets it running!

30

We’ve used Google Sheets for experimenting with custom formats.

A few advantages over Excel:

  • No single point of failure - it’s stored off the machine.
  • live updated displays - Just have another machine hooked up to a TV.
  • simultaneous editing for multiple scorekeepers, kept things flowing.
  • scripting in javascript, instead of VBA.

I’m planning on re-writing the format into something a little more error resistant as an interface, but it did provide a bunch of convenience when still experimenting with the format.