Match Play Events: The Next Generation

About a year ago I started working on the next version of Match Play in earnest. Progress hasn’t been as fast as I hoped for two reasons: This past year has been quite stressful due to… the world and it turns out Match Play is a complicated app that can do a lot.

Back in May I shared a couple of videos on Facebook to show what I was working on. I thought they may be interesting to people here and I figure I could use this thread to share more videos of what the next version of Match Play is going to look like.

Video #1: Entering match results
Two things have long bothered with with the current way you enter match results: You can’t save partial results (have to wait until the entire match is finished) and you always have to pick players from 1st through 4th even though you often know the 4th place finisher first. MP will switch to a matrix like in this video where you can enter results in any order and save partial results (don’t worry, you can still click the names on the left):

Video #2: Changing player order
The drag-and-drop solution for switching player order has always been quite janky and I want to get rid of that in favor of a solution that only uses clicking.

This video also shows off the new “inspector” that shows up on the right hand side. You’ll be able to use this to see details about a game/player/machine/etc without having to leave the page you’re on.

Video #3: Create tournament
And now for a new video. The “Create tournament” screen in Match Play is very intimidating. With each new feature, it has just grown and grown. The new version will be much simpler where you only have to enter the most important details.

After you have created your tournament, you will then be able to change each setting individually. This should make things a lot simpler for those tournaments where you just have to change one or two settings. You no longer have to look at an endless field of dropdowns to find the one setting you want to modify.

Looks like some good enhancements can’t wait to try it out.

Looks fantastic Andreas! Thanks for all your effort on this. Using it for so many tournaments its great to see these improvements.

Oh hell yeah! Thanks Andreas!!

My next event is 3/20 if you need a beta tester.

I will definitely be soliciting for testers as soon as I can, but it will be much later than 3/20. There are still missing pieces before you can run a successful tournament. Like, right now you can only add players already in the system – there’s no way to add a new player

Video #4: Create and edit series
One of the more common support emails I get are requests to edit tournament series because it’s not possible to make any changes after you’ve created the series. So if you picked the wrong scoring option or made a typo in the name your only option is to email me.

In the interest of saving everyone time the next version will make it possible to edit series.

I also noticed that if you create a series that you have to use the same playoff scoring as the series. So if a IFPA 7,5,3,1 in your series when you create playoff it doesn’t allow you to switch to a 4,2,1,0. That would be helpful too for our league I just always create a new playoff tournament.

Video #5: Scorbit scanner
Much of my time on the next version of Match Play is rebuilding features that already exist in the current version. This week I gave myself a little treat and added the first integration with @scorbit.

Clicking the QR icon opens a QR code scanner. This scanner can read QR codes generated by Scorbit. In the video I’ve printed the QR code on a random piece of paper, but in real world the QR code would be placed on the pinball machine itself.

After you scan the code, Match Play will go fetch the machine and venue information from Scorbit so you know you’re dealing with, for example, a Police Force machine located at Free Gold Watch in San Francisco.

If this machine is not in your tournament, you can add it with a single click. If the machine is already in the tournament you can go directly to that arena (and the TD can deactivate/active the machine).

This is just scratching the surface of how Match Play and Scorbit will integrate. We have some pretty awesome plans for how to speed up scorekeeping and just share data between the platforms.

::rubs hands together::

Oh been waiting for this type of integration with Scorbit and Match Play. Looking forward to these features and how they can be integrated to save time in entry of scores in the platform.

Video #6: Flip player order
Something small that I’ve always missed. When changing the player order on a match there will be a “Flip order” button to reverse the player positions. For all those cases where players are listed by seed but picking the opposite play order.

YES!!! I always have to do that manually for our playoff rounds, you are awesome!!!

If I could add more than one like/heart to this, I would flood it with likes.

This is the way!!!

Video #7: Pending rounds
This is one more thing that bothers me all the time but for various reasons is hard to change in the current Match Play version. In the next version you can edit games in a pending/unpublished round (change arenas or players).

In other words you’ll actually be able to fix things before publishing the round instead of only being able to look at things you wnat to change without being able to make those changes

But what if I love hearing the chorus of complaints and confusion when I have to change something after the round starts?

I’m not in a match!

Why am I first every round!?! (TD checks and they haven’t been first for even the majority of the rounds)

Why do I have to play Monopoly twice in a row?!?

I kinda miss this stuff. Haha

You mean you don’t have “moaned about playing the same game twice” participation awards?

Hmmm…”Biggest Complainer Trophy”. Might have to make a few of these.

Hi Andreas.

Just to let you know Dina and I are great fans of MatchPlay - we wouldn’t be able to run tournaments without it - awesome product.

We’re JDL_Pinball tournament streamers if you didn’t already know and we generally put rigs on 2 machines during qualification rounds. We’re able to show both games simulateously or switch between the two. We’ll then stream a few games (rounds) before moving the rigs to different machines.

Depending on the tournament format / number of players etc. it often happens that 1 or even 2 of the streamed machines are not drawn leaving a ‘blank round’ for the viewers.

I’m not sure if anyone else has requested this but is it possible to assign specific arenas to be always selected in each round and make it so the arenas could be changed if needed before each round is drawn? They could be called ‘stream or preferred arenas’ perhaps!

I know our tournament directory (Toby Wagemann) has a work-around for this but would be nice to have it as a feature.

We’re pretty much out of commission at present of course but looking forward to tournaments resuming in the not too distant future!

Take care, Jim.

Video #8: Arena banks
A short video to show that not everything is changing. How you configure arena banks stays pretty much the same. No point in trying to invent something new here

@JDL_PINBALL Last year you added this idea to the feedback forums and it’s received quite a few votes since then. That was the right thing to do – I monitor those ideas and look at the popularity when deciding which features to add to Match Play! A workaround would be to say “at the start of each round, if the preferred machine is not in use, a random machine will be replaced with the preferred machine”.

Thanks Andreas. Nice to know you follow the feedback forum too. Keep up the good work.
Look forward to working with your next generation post CV

Very cool. Is it possible to also bring in QR code scanning that is not dependent on Scorbit? That won’t take off here in Australia due to prohibitive cost.

Something that would be useful is printing a QR code and sticking it to the apron of a machine, and also scanning a player’s player card QR code. Just so a scorer can quickly get to a game or player name. Nice to have, but not the highest priority.

I will add QR code generation directly inside Match Play if there’s demand. But just to be clear: To generate & print the Scorbit QR codes you do not need to pay anyone anything. You just need the free Scorbit app. You do not need the Scorbitron hardware in your machines.

Don’t worry… player QR code are coming!

Let’s please - not have multiple QR codes though - Scorbit for this is free! Let’s use that!

Given Australia is about to be invaded by GNR and other JJP games with Scorbit built in you might see more take up - that’s what’s happened in the UK.

If I add QR code generation to Match Play I would make Match Play generate Scorbit QR codes. There would be no benefit in coming up with something else.

Didn’t know we could generate Scorbit QR codes for free. That is cool.

Video #9: Point adjustments
One thing that confuses many is that when you adjust points (or strikes) the number you pick is the total adjustment. So if you make one adjustment and then have to make a second adjustment to the same player, the second adjustment replaces the first adjustment.

I wanted to make this more clear so in the new version the existing adjustment is shown in the input field when you go to make subsequent adjustments.

Another constant point of confusion is that the point adjustment page was hard to find. In the new version you can adjust points from the “player inspector” so it’s available from anywhere you can click on a player’s name. In this video I’m adjusting points from the standings page, but I could also have done it from the players page or while looking at a specific match etc.

All good stuff, thank you! Do you have a rough idea on when this release will be available?

That’s a difficult question. I’m working on the features that are absolutely required to run tournaments (for example: adding players) while ignoring the rest (think stuff like challenge matches). This should allow me to open up for testers before finishing everything.

But timing is extremely difficult to talk about. The global pandemic has given me less time to work on Match Play (though getting better) and I’ve had some personal matters causing me to have to pause Match Play work for the past month.

I’m getting close to opening up the next version of Match Play for testers. If you run tournaments on Match Play and would like to help with testing, please fill out this form: https://forms.gle/w1FGvQ2sM5YtAzrf6

@haugstrup - Are you able to add Flip Frenzy as a choice for finals?

I wanted to share three videos showing off more of how the Scorbit integration will work on Match Play. Don’t forget you can get access to all this goodness by filling out this form: https://forms.gle/w1FGvQ2sM5YtAzrf6

Video #10: Scorbit account linking
Not a super exciting video, but an important part of having Scorbit and Match Play talk to each other is to link your accounts together!

Video #11: Scorbit location sync
Match Play uses the Scorbit collection of venues (that contains data from the Pinball Map as well) when you search for a location for your tournament. When you see the Scorbit logo next to the tournament location it means that the tournament is connected to a Scorbit venue, unlocking more integrations.

Video #12: Scorbit arena sync
…and the first of those integrations is that you can quickly add arenas to your tournament based on the Scorbit venue. And again: If you see a Scorbit logo next to an arena is means the arena is connected to Scorbit, unlocking more integrations!

This integration is possible because both Scorbit and Match Play uses data from the Open Pinball Database to identify pinball machines. This facilitates an open exchange of data between our platforms.

Much more to come here!

I’d like to throw my hat in the ring on this one as well. We do it when we have launch parties. I’d love to have a way to force Matchplay to use one particular game each round so that the launch game is always played.

Right now we start the round and if the game isn’t randomly picked, we use a RNG to pick the group who’s game gets switched to the launch game. It works just fine, but it would be cool to have it inside the software.

The Match Play beta lets you change the arena for matches before publishing a round so that’s half the battle at least (go fill out that signup form to get access).

For the other half, go leave you mark here: Preferred machines (for streaming) – Match Play Events feedback forums

Video #13: Players can submit Pingolf results
After years of gentle(?) encouragement from @JLemire it’s done. Players will be able to submit their own Pingolf scores in the next version of Match Play.

Only “automatic” suggestions are supported. That means when a player submits a result it’s automatically accepted as an official result. Once submitted a player cannot update their results. The tournament organizer can always change the result later if a mistake was made, of course!

Video #14: Get match results from Scorbit
Get yourself a Scorbitron (or a wifi dongle for your JJP machine) and entering scores and results by hand could be a thing of the past.

Video #15: Best Game Scorbit results
More Scorbit goodness. Pulling in scores when adding results in Best Game tournaments.

Full disclosure: I’m pretty darn excited about these features. The next version of Match Play will have a light-weight registration system built-in. Players can register themselves and tournament organizers can collect e-mails/phone numbers from their players, mark registrations as being paid and/or checked-in. With just a couple of clicks the organizer can turn registrations into players in the tournament.

Video #16: Configure registration settings
The tournament organizer has a handful of settings to toggle on/off for their tournaments. It’s flexible enough to handle most wishes. You can let players register themselves or manage everything yourself.

Video #17: Player registration
It has never been easier to register for a tournament. Match Play will automatically fill out your name, IFPA number, e-mail and phone number. Less typing, more pinball!

Video #18: Manage registrations
The tournament organizer can mark registrations as paid/checked in, move people on/off the wait list or edit all registration data. Finally they can click a couple of times to convert all registrations to actual players in the tournament!

Video #19: Series registrations
Tournament series also support registrations. You can use this to manage a roster for your league. Create a list of registrations (your roster) at the start of a season and add players from the roster to each tournament as you go. You can also just use the list to keep track of who has paid for that season.

I cannot wait for this to go live. Hopefully the price goes up for this so we can pay you for you hard work!! Thanks so much!

I’m a bad business person and the registration features will be available even without a paid subscription

Excited to use this for our larger tournaments.

But you should listen to yourself and become a better business person. Putting this feature as part of subscription only would offend nobody and hopefully make you a bit more profit from your efforts.

Been using the Beta for the past few months really enjoying the new features in it. The registration tool is great, can wait to be able to try it out.

I’ve used it for a couple of events with Scorbit integration, the platform just hoovers in the scores and results from the games! its effortless! Top job Andreas!

Video #20: Add group
Sometimes mistakes happen (or someone shows up late… again) and you really need an extra group created.

Used to be impossible, but now you can click a couple of times and add a new group to an existing round. Only available for group matchplay and group knockout tournaments because they’re flexible enough to handle this kind of chaos.

Try out the new Match Play here: https://next.matchplay.events/

New tournament format: Target Match Play
Set a points target, when a player reaches the target they’re not included in any subsequent rounds. You may recognize this format from such excellent tournaments as Pinball at the Lake and The Amazing Pinball Race.

This is a format exclusive to the new version of Match Play. It will not work in the old version. Go to: https://next.matchplay.events/

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Wondering what we should call this vs. the traditional target matchplay that ends when the first player reaches the target?

Is the idea behind this to continue playing until all players reach the target score? Or some predetermined # like 16 going into a finals?

Yep. The amazing race tournament in Columbus during the summer does this exact thing. Target matchplay qualifying with amazing race finals.

even then you can have more then one player hit or go over the target in the same round

I think the definition of “traditional target match play” depends a lot on where you are in the world. Like @chuckwurt says this is for situations where you’re playing qualifying and need a handful of players for finals. Pinball at the Lake in Southern California or The Amazing Pinball Race tournament in Ohio are the two most well-known tournaments I know of using this format.

If you’re halting all play the moment the first player hits your target, you don’t need a new tournament format in MP. You can run those using the existing “group match play” format.

@chuckwurt you have be able to guess what I’m working on next if you read on your message again. It will be amazing

Yep and the person with the most points over is higher ranked. If they are tied, break the ties by your typical means.

Can’t wait!!

@haugstrup I am testing a tournament in next.matchplay before an actual tournament, and I use automatic tiebreaks based on most 1st and 2nd places.

5 rounds in, this seems to not work as intended.

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If I look at my (Morten Søbyskogen) current results, I have two wins and one 2nd place:

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While the other Morten Bjellås has one win and two 2nd places:

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My understanding is that I should have a higher position because i have more wins, but currently we are placed both in 7th. Is this a bug or is there some stuff behind the scenes Im not aware of?

You have to include a link to your tournament or you really aren’t giving me a chance here

Ah, sorry, was thinking about the intentional behaviour, here is the link:

https://next.matchplay.events/tournaments/78832

I had time to look at this today and found a bug with the tiebreaker code in the new Match Play. It’s all fixed up now and the ties are broken like you’d expect. Thank you for letting me know @drainmorten

Got out of the habit posting here so here is a bit of a video dump.

Video #21: Randomizer
The randomizer received a bit of an upgrade. You can flip a coin, generate a random number or pick a random arena.

Video #22: View/copy/refresh IFPA rankings
At the bottom of the players list you can get a list of IFPA rankings for players in the tournament. Click a button to refresh the rankings or another to copy the list to the clipboard if you need it for whatever reason.

Video #23: Broadcast view
The broadcast view has been completely revamped. Various toggles for colors, size, orientation etc. As well as the ability to leave the broadcast view of the latest match on a specific arena.

Video #24: Pingolf arenas
The tournament organizer can attach an arena to each of the holes on a pingolf course (do this after starting the tournament). The arena name is shown when viewing and filling out scorecards.

A little extra for the pingolfers out there. Tournament organizer can set a par score and the scorecards will display the par over/under for each player.

Cool, we just held a PinGOLF tourney on Sunday and I had a lot of people asking me about par. I just told them to worry about total strokes instead of par but this is definitely themeatically much more fitting.

There isn’t a way to set groups is there? We play with the same 4 player group throughout our qualifying round and having a score entry process similar to group match play would be much easier for me to keep on top of entering scores.

@Shaub MP won’t make groups for you for pingolf tournaments. It’s just too much work and it seems like every TD has a different idea of how to create groups for pingolf tournaments.

But players can submit their own results! If they use the “new” version to do so. You should absolutely make players fill in their own scores and avoid doing all that data entry yourself.

Enable “automatic suggestions” for your tournament and you’re good to go. This video shows how a player can add their own results:

As I wrote in a previous post:

https://next.matchplay.events/tournaments/78998/scores

How do I add scores?
I watched the video above for Pingolf but that doesn’t appear for Best Game that I can see.

I’m able to enter them using the old version but they don’t auto approve (my own didn’t, that’s the only entry so far.)

To submit scores, go to the arena you want to submit a score for:

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@haugstrup You appear to have a time zone bug between the old matchplay site and the new site. If I enter an event as starting at 7:00 PM under the old site, it shows up as 6:00 PM in the new site. On both sites, my account is setup with a timezone setting of America/New York.

I do, yes! Unfortunately the problem is with the old MP. It’s off by one hour (I think it’s not taking daylight saving into account but I haven’t looked into it).

Set the time in the new site and forget about the old one. The old site never displays the time to your players so it doesn’t really matter that it’s off over there.

I have been totally snoozing on all of these exciting changes but am caught up now and very excited to plan my next tournament with the new version!

One question(for now;): Is it possible to seed a tournament by the players IFPA rankings? My apologies if I missed it.

Thanks Andreas!

Yep yep, you can create the same tournaments you can in the old version

I apologize if this has been asked before @haugstrup … is there any possibility or plan to do 4-player Group match play format with a Strict Swiss player pairing? I searched this thread for the word “strict” and didn’t find any instances.

I know the option exists for H2H format, and I wasn’t sure how difficult it is to build similar logic for that style pairing for Group match play.

i always thought strict swiss in 4 players would make a serious disconnect between “top” group match duration compared to the bottom group. Lots of waiting around for the quicker lower group waiting for the top one to finish.

I think we’re confusing nomenclature here: I believe you’re referring to just “Swiss,” as defined in MP.

“Strict Swiss” in MP is Swiss, but with a heavy preference toward avoiding repeat opponents.

So in regard to your point, Strict Swiss would be slightly better than just Swiss, to avoid the time discrepancy between top groups and bottom groups. At least by a little bit.

Hmmmmm, thinking as I type…. with a large enough player field, I think you’ll get the time discrepancy with either of those two options.

My reason for wanting it is to have Swiss, but not have the same players facing each other again and again: better for social mixing, and better for competitive equity as well, IMHO.

Yeah I think pairings is like you can have 2 of the three wants, but not all:

Limit repeat opponents
Top players play each other
Limit repeat arenas

Strict Swiss is basically an implementation of swiss pairings used in chess tournaments. The difference between and strict and not is that strict is… strict about not having repeat opponents. It’s useful for people who want to run very traditional swiss-system tournaments (like 32 players, play 5 rounds and be done).

With four-player groups building the pairings is a Really Hard Problem™ if you want the same strict rules about avoiding repeat opponents. Some years ago I did spend a bit of time on it, but the amount of work involved meant I didn’t pursue it.

I know there was a big match play tournament in Seattle that used magic squares to generate pairings (I forget the details), but I think it required the tournament to have a perfect number of participants so it wasn’t a good fit for Match Play (the software).

If you can write code (in PHP) I happy to have conversations on how to improve the swiss pairings in four-player tournaments. The strict swiss code was a contribution from a friendly pinballer who really wanted super traditional swiss pairings so he wrote the code to do so and I could integrate it into Match Play

Is that PHP offer also open for Magic Squares? I would love to have Magic Squares be an option in MatchPlay.

Generally speaking yes, but I’d like to understand the advantages and limitations better before you run out to write code. Shoot me and email and we can take it from there?

So I haven’t done coding in over two decades… don’t really have the desire to pick it up again. The logic I was thinking of that would work is:

• establish # of 4P and 3P groups
• start with best record player from previous round, or randomly choose a player who has best record if there’s a tie.
• start working down through the player field, starting with players that share the same record, or one (or more) slot worse than them. If the best player hasn’t faced them, then they’re in that group. If the best player has faced them, then skip them.
• continue that until the top group is filled.
• then repeat that process again with the remaining best player that isn’t already placed in a group.

Matchplay is currently spamming me with a bunch of text notifications from the tournament I played in last weekend. I tried to turn on notifications on both matchplay and next.matchplay but only ever got them for 1 arena change and not for any matches. They all came through at once just in the past 2 minutes.

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My apologies, the worker that processes text messages got stuck. I just restarted it and that unexpectedly that flushed a bunch of old jobs.

I’ll be switching to a different system before too long

Thanks for the quick update!

Is it intentional that the new version will not let you link directly to tournaments? It was nice to be able to send others (or even post to my blog) a link to a tournament so they could follow along.

I’m not sure I understand. What’s preventing you from sending a link of the tournament to people?

Maybe it’s been fixed since but I had thought direct links didn’t work if you weren’t logged in. It seems to be working now.

Video #35: Amazing Race
New tournament format: Amazing Race. All players play the same machine. Player with lowest score is eliminated. Everyone else plays the next machine. Player with lowest score is eliminated. Repeat until there’s only one player remaining.

Match Play manages queues for each machine and players start playing their next machine as soon as they advance, cutting down on wait times.

Video below of me moving through the basics. Requires a premium subscription and is exclusive to the new version of Match Play.

As always, access the new Match Play at https://next.matchplay.events/

Big thanks for Evan Bingham who runs this format annually and answered all my dumb questions.

Is it possible to adjust the number of people eliminated each round? I’m not familiar with this format but it seems like that would be a nice option to have.

Nope. The very core idea of the concept is that only one person is eliminated each game. No need to complicate matters

Sweet! Love this format. Great for someone like me who’s rarely the best but can usually avoid being the worst. I’ve run a few of them just with paper & pen at each game. We always called it Last Man Standing which, granted, is not exactly inclusive.

I played something like this in the past (Different name then Amazing Race)
But we just had some play 1st game in the line then stand by the game and as soon as some get’s an lower score as your game then you move to next game in the line.
I don’t really see how you can cutting down on wait times having to report scores to the DESK may make them longer.

We just ran a Head to Head Single Elimination finals last weekend, is there any plans to allow a best-of-x format to individual record each game played and not just who won the entire series?

Eventually this will be nice to support recording individual results for best-of-x but it can’t happen until I can shut down the old version of MP

Is that because the old version has limitations and the new version has to operate within them?

Yep, in some cases I can work around them. In others I can’t.

We ran League night tonight and decided to try out a side-game Amazing Race. People loved it!

Big Screen view was clutch to show where people stood and who was on the hot seat. Queues ran themselves. Positive reactions from players when they reached the target or got off the hot seat. Loved the ability to pick a game as soon as the round started.

Also loved the ability to add players (and remove) players into Round 1 after the event start since we didn’t know how many we’d have at the start.

Overall, it took a while. We had 11 people, and after 2 hours (running at the same time as League) we got it down to 5. At that point we called it and made the five play a final game and declared a winner.

If I am being a choosing beggar here, I would love love love the ability to pick the number of eliminations per round. If we could remove three or four per round, this is a very viable (and fun!) format to run as a side event.

If that’s not possible, if I were to run this again I would run two at once and split the group and make the winners face off.

No idea what games you had to choose from, but when I ran these we always had a mix of classics & moderns. I structured the race from shortest playing game to longest, burning through the classics for some quick early eliminations.

Makes sense! Location we played last night had a bunch of moderns. Next time I run a proper IFPA one we’ll do it at a place with a bunch of classics.

Another thing is that if someone slips up early in a round, it makes it much quicker. Had one round where someone got 49M on Theatre of Magic early, and that round was lightning-quick vs. the round that multiple people got 6M+ on Funhouse.

Does anyone know how TGP works for this format?

Each game played in the amazing race portion counts as 1 MGP or 4% TGP I believe.

Same as @chuckwurt mentioned - when I ran an Amazing Race finals last month, I used 1 TGP per game in finals for the results.

I really feel like it would make sense to count as 2X value (2MGP/8%TGP). If 4 player games get double value, surely >4 player games should to, and that’s essentially what it is. Not a hill Im gonna die on or anything, just a thought.

I suppose you could view it as a 1 strike tourney, where only last place takes a strike.

You can also make the argument they should count as 1/3 MPG since in many cases the majority of the players are passing the target score in one ball. 1 MPG feels generous with how little skilled play it takes to advance at times.

That’s not a knock on the format, as it gets pretty fun toward the end, but there can be an awful lot of fluff in the first half of eliminations.

Also there are many formats where you technically have one last person standing, eh?

does the format need a direct play portion? i’m a little confused by the direct play requirement: pin golf doesn’t count even if all players play all the same holes, but 4 consecutive games by the 4 finalists on a single player EM would count?

sorry this thread is a little derailed.

Boo! Don’t bring logic into this.

Any plans to have a one click WPPR estimator or TGP calculator connected to this?

All the improvements so far sound amazing! Thanks for all the work and happy to contribute money for the improvements!

Unless @pinwizj and IFPA makes the TGP calculations much much (much much much) simpler I won’t be adding a TGP calculator. The TGP system is far too complicated and changes too much to be something that’s possible for me to automated at this point.

I made TGP calculator for WPPR 5.2 (the 2016 edition). I think that was the last time I’d want to be involved in that particular exercise. TGP calculations have gotten a lot worse since then!

I assume you already know about the one linked on the IFPA site under Resources, but if not, here you go.

https://chunkout.com/wppr/WhatWPPRs.php

it’s the TGP calculations that are tricky, not the WPPR estimation.

Yeah, I just figured you could have a tab that does the same calculation rather than going to another site and putting in the matchplay id

Video 26: Pingolf Predictions
Friday fun time with Pingolf tournaments: Predict the outcome of the tournament while in progress

Available in the new Match Play, a chart that shows the predicted result (player continues to play the same average), a likely range of results (player plays 25% better or 25% worse) and the total possible range (player gets all hole-in-ones or all max strokes).

Chart is useful if results are entered as you go. Take advantage of the feature that lets players enter their own results as soon as they finish a hole.

Thank you to Eugene Gershtein for the inspiration and spreadsheet starting point. It’s not exactly what you wanted, but should be fun anyway And thank you @bkerins for number crunching and data visualization advice!

As always, this is where you want to go: https://next.matchplay.events/

How easy/difficult would it be to put in “Count Best X” for Pingolf?

We’ve been running a format where:

• There’s 9 machines
• You pick 6 to play
• You count the best 5 scores (drop one as a mulligan)

This format gives us flexibility if a machine goes down, and gives players a mental boost if they have a single bad game.

If I’m being a choosing beggar, I want to use all these cool new golf features while still having an easy way to have an accurate PGM and only count their best 5 holes.

Right now what I do is I don’t assign arenas, we manually look at their scorecard, and put in their top 5 and the hole has no connection to the actual machine played.

I’ve added a setting for you to only count the best X results for each player. See screenshot below.

The golf predictions will work just as well if players play all holes (players play 9 holes, best 8 are counted), but in your specific case the predictions won’t be as good. This is because if you create a course of 9 holes in MP, but players actually only play 6 of them (with 5 counting) then there’s no way for MP to know that players on play six. Predictions are based on the assumption that players play the entire course. They should still give an idea but the actual numbers won’t make sense for you.

I did double check the PGM calculation I think it’s still correct, but I’ll rely on you to double-check that for me

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As always Andreas, thank you.

Does the new software convert score on each hole into strokes in minus or positive based on the par of holes. I always use my own scoresheet due to that but if is shows this I will try it out next week in our PinGolf Championship.

@diehardpinball Yep, I added par scores a while back. On the scorecards page you can click on the table headers to sort whichever way you want.

I’ve made large number of improvements to pingolf recently:

• Set a par score and see +/- for each player
• Sort the scorecards table any way you want
• Attach arenas to golf holes so players can see which hole belongs to which machine
• Set target scores for each arena and MP will show the Pin-masters score brackets (for 6-10 strokes) for each arena
• Predictions for likely results during the tournament
• Charts showing the score distribution for each arena

You can see all of that in action on this tournament (predictions are not that interesting because the tournament is over): Match Play Events

Thanks I haven’t fooled around with it for a while I will use it next weekend thanks for all your hard work!

Doing a little testing today and I have some questions.

What is the difference between “Overall max. attempts” and “Attempts on each arena”? On a related note, “Number of arenas counted” vs “Number of Best Games”?

I’ll describe what I’m trying to do.
8 week league meets once per week, five games per week.
Everyone plays the same five games each week, Linear scoring. Lowest two weeks are dropped.
If a player is absent for a meet their score will be zero, so that week would be dropped.

I think using a Series will do what I want but not quite sure about the number of attempts, arenas counted, and best games.

Ideas welcomed if there is a better way.
Thanks

For definitions of the options see the handbook (haven’t gotten this moved to the new system yet): Best game tournaments | Match Play Events Handbook

I also think you want to set this up as a series with one tournament per week (so you can drop the two worst weeks). As far as I understand you want to count all five games each week but drop the worst two weeks.

So you want to count all 5 games in each tournament, but let the series drop the worst results.

I wished there was an option to include playoff points into the standings. Our league does 15/20 but the points for the playoffs on that night are also included in the overall points. We are still using a spreadsheet to calculate those manually. Otherwise the 15/20 would great within MP.

I’m afraid I don’t understand. What’s 15/20 and what exactly is the problem with standings?

I also don’t know what you mean by 15/20, but can you include your playoffs as an event in the series? That will allow the points from the finals to be included in the overall series points. Not sure how that works with different events in the series having different formats.

We count 15/20 events… in other word we drop 5 events. Each event runs a playoff.

So 7 round match play 7,5,3,1 it count all points, however when I then run the playoffs 4,2,1,0 it does not add those points in the series that was created for those 20 events.

That is all I was getting to…

In our league on any given night you can get 49 + 12 + 12 = 73 league points for any given night. Match Play does the up to 49 well in a series but no option to add playoff rounds scoring to series points.

I can confirm that if you have your series set to “sum of points” then playoff tournaments are not pulled into the standings for each tournament when calculating the series standings. Honestly it’s that way because I couldn’t conceive of someone structuring their league the way you have

No worries, we have done it that way for 8 years. Our league standings are actually wins, then points too which complicates the formula, as we feel winning is more important than the accumulation of points (much like NASCAR standings). It is no big deal to do it outside of the system.

We did the PinGolf and the software is great, so much better having everyone enter scores in system and not doing paper and manual entry on a spreadsheet anymore THANK YOU!!!

Would be nice if the big screen view showed the standings as •/+, and holes played instead of total score and holes played. That is more of what a leaderboard would look like in real golf. Another nice feature would be to add a cut line there so people knew where the playoff cutoff is (ours was top 12) but again all nice to haves. I also noticed there was not a broadcast view for the stream in PinGolf format and that would be a nice add to if you get the -/+ working. Have the ability to put your players in foursomes or threesomes so they can be displayed in the software, might be able to be achieved by having a starting hole for each player.

really like the new broadcast screen!

You got it to work in OBS? Last I tried, you couldn’t select new games and change its state via a browser source in OBS.

No I’ve been using xsplit but I keep hitting a bug in xsplit that might mean I need to use OBS so will test that out this week.

We use OBS and it does work in regular match play but the broadcast view in PinGolf isn’t setup yet. It works very slick and a greater improvement for sure from the previous version.

Great thanks. I’m gonna give it another go.

With Single Elimination Brackets, is it possible to set it to a best-of-x? It would be nice to enter results on a game by game basis.

Yes i agree with @Shaub, we just had our league playoff and we still had to do the games and wins per round on paper, it would be nice if there was an option for example, 16 player bracket best of 7 games per round or best of 5, etc

@Shaub @Sychie I think I can do this if you each convince 5 of your friends to switch to next.matchplay.events

What makes you think I even have 5 friends?

Are you going to make a hard cut off of the “old” version soon?

To be honest I’m not sure how I’m going to handle it. I may end up doing it step by step like:

• Put a banner on the old version pointing to the new version
• Start deleting features from the old version
• Close down the old version entirely

But like right now you can’t pay for a premium subscription on the new version. I definitely want to make sure that’s possible before shutting down the old version!

For regular tournament use there’s no reason not to make the switch. I haven’t made an update to the old version in almost three years and if it breaks it’s not coming back.

On the wish list would be a Survivor Ladder format.

For example in our league we start with 10 players, the 7,8,9,10 starts, they play a game, the winner move on the next round, then the bottom three play in a three player game, the winner advances to next round, then the two left play head to head, the winner advances and the loser is eliminated. The next grouping has the 6th seed and it continues in that format until the end. At the end we do a best of 3 finals in the head to head but that doesn’t need to be coded in necessarily.

Food for thought if you are looking to add more types of tournaments.

Keep up the great work!

I know there isn’t an option for more than 1 game per round but the Ladder Elimination Bracket seems like it should mostly do what you need, no? Just enter the winner of game 1 as 1st place, winner of game 2 as 2nd place, winner of game 3 as 3rd place and then 4th place is eliminated.

I would have to create each round as a tournament. In my case that is 7 rounds. It can be done and to have it look nice on stream I might do that but it is a bit of a pain.

If you’re using the existing software, I think you can still get away with doing this on a ladder as @Shaub suggested, but essentially each three-game stretch is a single game in MatchPlay.

7,8,9,10 play, winner is on to next round and marked as 1st
remaining three play, winner is on to next round and marked as 2nd
remaining two play, winner is on to next round and marked as 3rd
loser is marked as 4th and is eliminated

Next round starts with 6 Seed + remaining players

Hmm okay I will test it, I am primarily using next match play and didn’t really see the option to incorporate the format on first glance.

This is a workaround but it will still show the four players in the broadcast view, which is not what I really want.

The best option would be to create seven ladder tournaments:

7-10 seed - Tournament 1
6 seed - Tournament 2
5 seed - Tournament 3
4 seed Tournament 4
3 seed Tournament 5
2 seed Tournament 6
1 seed tournament 7
Head to Head best 3 - Tournament 8

A lot of work if I want to the broadcast to look the right way for the stream. If I wasn’t streaming then we could just use the @Shaub suggestion.

@haugstrup is there an issue with breaking ties in the new version? For instance, the standings page of the old version showed Median-Buchholz/Solkoff scores in a column labeled “Ties” next to the points, see https://matchplay.events/live/0781z/standings.

The new version has a column labeled “ADJ.” instead, which is empty, see https://next.matchplay.events/tournaments/81890/standings.

This doesn’t seem to be just an issue of whether the tie-breaking scores get displayed or not, the standings themselves are actually different in the two links above.

Another question, I’m assuming the IFPA does not consider Max Matchplay to be a version of Flip Frenzy, is this correct?

correct since it is not “time based” with players having much less games than others, but round based that EVERY player will play.

I did a test and one player played two games less and another player played 1 game less than everyone so it isn’t perfect that is for sure but an interesting take I like the timed event because you knew when it ended but will try this out and see how it all works.

Can you share the tournament link to your test one? I’d be interested to see the round/player count and how it ended up locking you into that position.

For what it’s worth for people testing out Max Match Play, I ran through a number of scenarios with Andreas, and if you always pick an EVEN number of rounds you avoid a single player being “odd one out”. If you have an odd number of rounds, you need an even number of players and you run the risk of running into an issue if a player drops out (or you add someone new).

Plus, Max Match Play makes an effort to avoid pairing you against the same opponent until you’ve cycled through all available players. It even helps with Arena Balancing, which I know was an issue in Flip Frenzy if you happened to get caught in a weird cycle based on available players and games.

Also, IFPA posted this up tonight.

Key dates related to NACS/WNACS:

• TDs need to submit by January 4th
• Players need to declare NACS and WNACS State/Province by January 7th, 8pm CST
• NACS - January 21st
• WNACS - January 22nd

i did 2 test and i had no problem as soon as you follow the guideline from the software, what @coreyhulse mentioned.

There’s an off-by-one for at least one player (Ralf) for the buchholz value. I’m looking at it and one question first. What’s the story about round 11. You have a game with only one player but it’s not a bye game. So how’d that happen?

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Interesting, I picked that tournament at random, and it looks like that weirdness in round 11 might actually be the cause of the issue. I’ve looked up some other tournaments now, and they don’t show the same standings discrepancy between versions.

I’m afraid I can’t tell you what happened in round 11, I wasn’t the organizer. I’ll try to get some info. Not sure how this is even possible, though, and even if it is, I dont’ really understand how a bye that counts as a win would be any different from a win without an opponent, since both would be discarded for Median-Buchholz.

Apart from that, though, is there a reason why the tie breaking scores aren’t shown in the new version? And what’s the new “ADJ.” column, is this where the tie breaking scores are supposed to be shown, or is this something else entirely?

I spoke with Andreas about this previously. Here is what he said.

“The new MP is using the same tiebreaking formula as the old version and if you look in the left column you can see that ties are being broken.

It’s just that the new version doesn’t show the raw numbers used to break ties. I haven’t decided whether to show them or not. They always were weird because they’re essentially magic numbers in the sense that any random person can’t see why the number or one thing for one player and another thing for another players.

So I’m been trying to figure out how to not just show the numbers but also explain what the numbers mean. I just haven’t had time to do the thinking on how to present all that…”

Is there anyway to fix the font so player names that are long will fit in the vertical orientation?

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Thanks for the info. I think if showing tie breaking scores is not even an option, that will make the switch a lot harder for a bunch of communities. There are big parts of Europe that have been playing Swiss since long before matchplay.events was around, and every software that has ever been used for this purpose showed some variation of Buchholz in the standings.

The only reason it might look like a weird magic number that needs a lot of explaining is that legacy matchplay shows two different tie breaking scores at the same time. If it just used Median-Buchholz by default (or maybe made it a setting which calculation to use instead of showing both), it would be very easy to explain:

“Basically the sum of all of your opponents’ points”, that’s good enough for most people. If you really wanted to go into the details, “with top and bottom scores removed to make it fairer, because you can’t control what opponent you get in round 1”, easy as that. I’ve never had anyone not understand that.

HTH MP is the simplest case. The different tournament formats have different tiebreaker values. I do want to display the tiebreaker values, but I have to do it for all tournament formats at the same time and have to put them all into context. I’ll get there soon!

The fix is what you see: To truncate longer names using an ellipsis

Missed a spot… the ADJ column shows points that have been manually adjusted.

If you’re willing to pull in another script, textFit seems to work pretty well.

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@TomGWI Depending on how comfortable you are using browser developer tools, you could maybe hack things together to make this work even if @haugstrup doesn’t want to build it in to Match Play Events.

Any chance next.matchplay could have a feature to fully delete players from the player list instead of (or in addition to) flagging them inactive?

After many years of running events with Match Play, I have 500 or more players who are never going to come back to an event and it would be great to be able to clean this list up.

Tommy thank you so much. I already hack the old version but didn’t know how to make it work.

Poor Kassidy and Alexander can’t get their names to be seen. lol

@haugstrup a few things I’ve missed using the next version of Matchplay: vanity URLs and pulling games from pinball map without Scorbit logo

Vanity URLs are pretty nice to help people quickly find the tournament

The alert when trying to add games “From Location” confuses me regarding Scorbit. None of the games at our location have Scorbit installed. Can we still use this feature by spuriously putting the logo on our Pinball Map listing? Not really interested in false advertising, so the logo isn’t going on the page, but I wanted to understand what has changed here?

Match Play Events sorry for the lateness in reply… Been busy with trying to get our website up and running for the show.

I just did another test that one work good, had to do the override on it but works very slick, can’t wait to try the format out on Jan 20 just before Provincials.

I ran a Pingolf tourney yesterday where I wanted to create a top four player playoff (10% out of 40 players per IFPA requirement) but it wouldn’t let me (I selected “other” and it started to cry that at least 6 were required and 8 was the lowest in the dropdown). We ended up doing pen and paper but I realized now I could just have created a new pingolf tourney with 4 holes on it. I must be misunderstanding something.

I used the new registration function for this tourney and it worked out well. There were some complaints about not being able to remove your own registration, I’m sure there’s a reason for that.

I was also registering people on site who wanted to get on the waitlist and I was expecting the same dialog as you would “Add Players” as you would add registrations when in TD mode.

So I’ve gotten “around” this by doing a 4-Player PinGolf Finals as an 8-Player PinGolf Finals.

First round is the 4-players and 4 “dummy players” seeded so that’s split 2/2. Give the real people good scores and the fake people bad scores, and then you’re onto Finals.

I’ve also used a Google Spreadsheet when I’m in a pinch, and then translate to MatchPlay later:

Also @haugstrup - I’m sure oEmbed/OpenGraph is low on your priority list but TiltForums is saying it’s can’t render a preview:

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Oh, clever! I’ll have this in mind for next year unless we’ll get a 4 player playoff fix.

We ran our first Max Match Play last night.

• 10 Games
• 22 Players
• 9 Machines on location (Mostly moderns + Quicksilver, but Quicksilver took a bath 2/3 of the way through)
• When we got down to 5 active matches, we drew new opponents
• Like Germain’s post, it took a bit to get everyone on next.matchplay but once they were there it was good
• 110 games took 3-ish hours, while a Frenzy of similar timing would be 2 hours and a five round match-play would be 2.5 hours

What I liked:

• Good feedback from people on next.matchplay
• People can log their own results
• No repeat opponents
• I was worried about a “long tail” of players needing to catch up at the end, but everyone wrapped up nearly at the same time
• Was still some chaos, but not at frantic as a frenzy itself
• Stats page was awesome to let me see who was eliminated and who had a shot still. Players liked it as well.

What needs work:

• I think you definitely need more games than player-pairs if you want better efficiency - Railroad (our venue) only has 9 games, and Quicksilver went down about 2/3 of the way through
• We had 22 players, so there was always 4-6 people waiting for a match which dragged things out
• It would be nice if the big board was in alphabetical order
• It would also be nice if the Refresh rate on the big board was less than 60 seconds - I would draw a round and we’d have to wait up to a minute to see new matches unless I manually refreshed it
• No “queue” visible on the big board so we had to read names out-loud of people on the “bench”
• We ended up with a 5-way tie for 3rd (all people at 7-3), so we needed to run a play-in

Overall, fun to try a new format and we had a raucous pre-christmas crowd which made it fun in my view.

need to test with an odd number of players

I run into the same issue with the next Flipper Frenzy big screen view as well, the refresh rate is too slow for that kind of format, in fact even for our regular match play it would be nice for it to be at 10-15 seconds refresh rate for all formats on big screen view. As well for FF be nice to have more groups in view like the old software I know it scrolls now but it is a bit difficult to view and I usually turn the scrolling off as people have a hard time finding their game as they need to wait for the scroll.

i used the built it “player strength” tie breaker for my event, no time to run actual games

When Andreas and I were exchanging messages about the format, we worked through the possibilities.

• Even Players / Even Rounds → No Odd-Person Out Problems
• Even Players / Odd Rounds → No Odd-Person Out Problems
• Odd Players / Even Rounds → No Odd-Person Out Problems
• Odd Players / Odd Rounds → You get a single person who can’t play their final match

Andreas even built in a warning about this:

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so an even that says we will have an Odd number of Rounds will be forced to add / remove an round?
Can’t play with an Odd number of players?
Forced to add an fake player to make it happen?

I see one place planing to try this at 15 rounds so that may fail on them.

Alright, I’ve been taking some time off the computer. Let’s see if I can cover everything

If you go to your global list of players you can “retire” a player and that player will not show up anywhere. You can’t delete the players because that would ruin old tournaments that need to be able to display the player.

The new version of MP hides retired players from your global list (unlike the old version) so they’re even more hidden there.

I agree! To switch vanity URLs over they will all start to redirect to the new version of MP. That’s something I’ve been reluctant to do so far, but I think it’s time soon.

I will be reworking the feature first though. I was never super happy with how vanity URLs worked in the old MP and will be making some changes to make them more flexible.

This is confusing and that’s my fault. I will be re-doing this flow to make things more clear. Scorbit uses data from the Pinball Map under the hood so all your machines can be found even if you don’t have Scorbitron hardware installed in any of them.

You can pretend the Scorbit logo is a Pinball Map logo. Find your location on MP using the search function and then your machines should show up in the “from location” tab (if they’re listed on Pinball Map).

But yeah, I’ll be making this more clear in a future update.

This may be one of the fights I have to give up on. In my brain four player group bracket tournaments make no sense since no players are being eliminated. But it’s been almost 8 years and people still want create these tournaments.

There’s not really. Why did people want to delete their registration?

Creating a registration is different than adding a player because registrations can have requirements like the custom questions you can ask of every registrant. But you can register a player by finding their user account and that streamlines the process somewhat.

This is on my list, but I admit it’s very far down the list

On the list of improvements to make!

Do NOT add a fake player. It can really result in some unfair results.

If your event has an odd number of games played and you end up with an odd number of players you should adjust the number of games played instead. Decide if you’re going to add or remove a round in case of a odd number of players and tell people (and IFPA) ahead of time.

Or even simpler: Always play with an even number of games played. Problem solved.

Ah, missed one. I think I’ve figured out how to display the tiebreaker numbers in a way where the numbers can be explained. I’ll get it implemented, but I can’t say when.

While the numbers may be easy to explain for Europeans who only play HTH swiss tournaments, keep in mind that MP supports over a dozen different tournament formats with many different tiebreaking numbers used. I have to make something that works for all of them!

For my location, Pinball Map and the Scorbit-powered list in MP are not aligned. The Sync Scorbit button doesn’t change anything. Is this an issue with Match Play, Pinball Map, or Scorbit?

A person may register, planning to attend, and then later change their plans. Deleting their registration would be a way to communicate that they don’t plan on attending.

We ran a max match play with 31 players, about 10 arenas, and 10 matches. It took about 3 hours. The overall biggest problem I see with the format is the number of ties.

We had said we would advance just under half of the field to the finals and seeding mattered so we had quite a few tiebreakers to work through.

I don’t feel like it’s a good format for automatic strength of schedule tiebreakers since the pairings are random. Maybe automatic tiebreakers would be better if there was some sort of “similar strength opponent” preference in the pairing algorithm but I think it’d still be pretty far from the effect of a true Swiss pairing approach. So I guess just plan on having lots of ties with this format.

actually because paring is random having more values for your W that are against stronger opponent makes sense to me.

@haugstrup For many of our players this was their first time using the new version of the site. Despite announcements asking them to go to the new site, many still went to the old version. They encountered error messages there.

Suggestion: maybe the old site could have a banner at the top of the tournament page for any max match play event that links to the new site page for that tournament?

Also, a note for tournament directors: with flip frenzy the waiting list is a queue so players can gauge how much time they’ll have before their next match. With Max Match Play, it felt more unpredictable given that it skips over players to avoid repeated pairings. So we had to spend more time tracking down players who had wandered off and didn’t know their turn was coming up again soon.

I’m taking this one on the Match Play shoulders because I built things based on an incomplete understanding of how Scorbit and Pinball Map interacts.

From my side I was hoping to only build one integration. It’s easier for me to manage if I could only interact with Scorbit instead of having to interact with both Scorbit and Pinball Map.

But Scorbit is setup such that if a person “claims” a location in Scorbit then Scorbit will stop syncing data from Pinball Map. This is a reasonable approach because from the Scorbit side they’re assuming that if someone claims the location they’ll also keep the data up to data.

What happens some times though is that someone is playing around with Scorbit, claims a location as theirs but never returns. Now the data grows stale over time. I can’t say for sure, but I bet that’s what’s happened at your location.

Now, I wasn’t aware of this particular behavior when I planned the “From location” feature in MP, but I learned later how this is pretty annoying for TDs when it does happen.

So what I’ll be doing is what I was hoping to avoid: I’ll change the “From location” feature so you can get the list of machines from either Scorbit of Pinball Map. Then as a TD you pick whatever list of machines reflect reality.

That change will take time though. I think it’ll be nice in the end, but as always it’s a question of finding the time!

The pairings aren’t random. They’re highly deterministic. Players will be playing opponents they haven’t played before. The strength-of-schedule tiebreaker is a great tool for these kinds of pairings. It’ll perform just as well as if you’d played a similar number of balanced pairing rounds of regular match play.

It’s pretty dangerous for me to make changes to the old MP at this point That said, in the new year I will soon be starting to push all people to the new MP no matter what kind of tournament you’re playing.

Before long I will also start to take parts of the OLD MP site down. Sections that are resource intensive and have equivalent features are first on the chopping block (the Ratings pages will be first to go).

@haugstrup revisiting this question. With all the SCS single elimination tourneys coming up… can the Best of X and/or match score (4-3, 4-2, 4-1, 4-0) be added for documenting results?
Even better if we could put the name of each game, and option for adding in a score for each game. But simply being able to record the 4-2, etc result would be great!

(tagging @spraynard on this, too, since we’re working through TX SCS setup)

but that is player game choice so don’t default to random game picking

Let’s see how this goes over the next week. I can’t do the deluxe version where you can enter the arena and scores for each game because I’ve nowhere to put that data in the database currently (so basically can’t happen until I can fully transition away from the old Match Play). But I think I can get the win/loss numbers in there.

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nice i would rather stay with matchplay than challonge this again

I ran this format for my 007 launch party tonight, 16 players, 10 rounds. Ended with 2 odd-people out! The final two had already played each other, so I couldn’t create another game. I can only imagine it had something to do with the timing of when I created games throughout the evening. I typically created more games when half the field was in the waiting room.

When you create new matches there’s a “safety valve” checkbox for this very purpose. Check that box to relax the “can’t play the same player twice” restriction so the two players can play each other a second time to finish the tournament.

Not sure how I missed that, it’s right there. Thanks. Feedback from players was overall very positive.

Thank you!

@Snailman @spraynard @hisokajp give this a go (available now):

Ive never run a league/series before, Im just wondering what needs to be done to create a finals for it. Is it as simple as just creating a Finals as a separate tournament and using the final series standings to generate my player list? Or is there a more streamlined integration of “create playoffs” from the series itself in the same way that a qualifying tourney can be used to create playoffs as another tournament.

One the qualification is done, you just create playoffs, in next match play you can even change the scoring format which I like doing. For DHPL I do a 20 league event format with 7,5,3,1 scoring and then run the playoffs direct from those league events with 3 machines and an 4,2,1,0 scoring and it runs really slick. We also run a novice playoff but I have to create a separate tournament for that. Would be nice if Next Match Play had the ability to categorize the players via IFPA rank to A, B, Novice or whatever you wanted based on a rank criteria, much in how the machine types work. Maybe one day, as then that would make it easier to place restrictions on players and also be able to branch out and put them in separate tourneys without having to manually do it. Would also be nice if MatchPlay added all of the points from that event, playoff and league to give you the total of the night but we just do it manually for now.

Unfortunately there’s not a more streamlined integration. You create a standalone tournament. It’s been on my list forever to make a “create playoffs” feature for series, but it’s never made it all the way to the top of the list.

Would definitely be a nice feature to auto populate the players in the playoffs.

For those who have run a Max Matchplay tournament: now that we get penalized for pulling long playing games mid-tournament have you found that long playing games affect tournament run time more/less or the same as in other match play formats?

It would affect them the same. Also, you can change settings on machines mid tournament to make them harder, it just might upset the player base. At least I think that’s still allowed.

In this format I don’t see any issue with a mid-game adjustment (just communicate at start of tournament so people don’t get miffed) would be the same as a normal match play format where you could make adjustments after a round.

not much different that if you are using “long” games in any other format. it’s all about luck as well, if a few of your top players end up on long games, that could affect the overall length of the tourney, if you they don’t then it is pretty seamless.

Theoretically, long-playing games should affect Max Match Play slightly less than a standard MP format. In the latter, every round it’s used, the long game is holding up ANY OTHER game from starting. In Max MP, it only holds up those two players from making progress in their total# of games played, while the rest of the field keeps playing. Those two players in the long game stand a decent chance of offsetting their long game with some short ones while other pairings have relatively longer games.

No worries, I just wanted to make sure I wasn’t missing something.

Get to work!

There were two different reasons that came up. Folks had to cancel their pinball plans, which happens. The other was simply that one person created a registration for two different people as I understood it and somehow they wanted to remove the duplicate.

I did not see this in the UI. Only “dumb” fields without any dynamic lookup for either “Name”, “IFPA Number” and “E-mail”

Now I know why I put the word dumb in quotation marks. Thanks for clarifying!

This may have been covered in a previous post but is there any documentation on the strength of opponent tiebreaker formula. I used it for the first time in our league and it is great as it eliminates all of the ties that can result in a six round match play. But it would be nice for players to kind of understand on how it works or is calculated. As well the new big screen version for Match Play is great but it sure would be nice if the games were listed in alphabetical order for ease of viewing.

if I remember it right:

• Automatic tiebreaking: Ties are broken using the strengths of opponents faced.

It calculates the average points earned of every one of your opponents.

Here’s a tournament we ran on Saturday with Automatic Tiebreaking

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It was 7/5/3/1 scoring

Vince got 60 points an on average his opponents got 4.71 points.

Cliff and Uchendu both got 50 points, but Cliff’s opponents got 4.78 points and Uchendu’s got 4.31 points, so Cliff wins the tiebreaker.

There were six people all with 48, but the Strength of Schedule sorted them based on opponent average (Justin and Nick spent most of the day with the higher-point groups, and Bob/Logan started the day near the bottom but worked their way up).

I personally love Automatic Tiebreaking. Helps with seeding. I can see an argument for not using it for Division Splits, but in a timing pinch I think it works well.

Ya it is a tough call as our league is a 6 round balanced draw for groups, so you are kinda stuck with whomever you randomly get assigned to. We have the top 16 advance to playoffs but ultimately two lost out to the tiebreaker using this formula. Myself I was 10 seed thou I tied with 6 other people, glad I didn’t get third on that last game in my group or I probably would not have advanced to playoffs, where I eventually won. But removing those tiebreakers saves a ton of time and ease for sure in playoff seeding as well, where it was way to random before.

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If it’s Swiss Pairing, I like Automatic Tiebreakers.

If it’s Random Pairing, then # of 1sts and # of 2nds I think is a good alternate. It’s then clear and the player has control over the outcome vs. Automatic where it’s luck of the draw for opponents.

Funny enough if I used 1&2 like we used last year in this example I would have probably been closer to 5-7 seed with my 3 wins and 1 Second. Not sure I am sold on Swiss for this small of a sample size as well, tough calls here but I really do like the Strength of Schedule tiebreaker.

@haugstrup can you still invite players to challenges on next.matchplay?

I haven’t built challenge matches in the new version and I haven’t decided if I’m going to. Challenge matches became super popular in 2020 when IFPA stopped endorsing tournaments, but since then usage has fallen to almost nothing (around 10 per month).

I’d like to find out if they’re not used because people don’t care for how I built them the first time around or if it’s because people don’t want to use that kind of feature, period.

If it’s a feature people really want to use I’m happy to bring them back (with whatever changes are needed), but it’s not worth the effort if it’s only going to be used by 10-20 people every month…

I’ve always liked the feature. I forget about it most of the year, but find it to be good practice for state championships.

This is my preference as well. There’s a greater chance of still having a tie when using “Number of 1sts & 2nds”; but for a short tournament with Balance or Random pairings that seems most fair to me. Using 1sts and 2nds means that players know how they can influence their tiebreakers. Improving from 3rd to 2nd is more valuable than improving from 4th to 3rd. A player who always gets at least 2nd will do better than a player who has a mix of 1sts and 3rds. When using the Automatic Tiebreakers (i.e. strength of schedule), the player has no agency at all over their tiebreaker value.

If tournament runtime is really critical, I still like using 1sts and 2nds as the tiebreak setting with a one-ball tiebreaker for any players still tied.

If would be really nice if you could select two criterias for the tiebreakers.

Criteria 1: 1&2 places
Criteria 2: Schedule of Opponents

That would eliminate pretty well all of the tiebreakers.

When searching for a tournament by name, the results are sorted by Date instead of Relevancy – this is making it challenging for people to find the tournament link. Without vanity URLs it is extra challenging. (This is on mobile.)

Thank you for maintaining Matchplay Events!

Something that I have liked about the new Matchplay is that the dashboard will show tournaments that you are in so long as you are signed in and have your IFPA number linked. Those last two pieces are a bit of a sticking point with new players and the technologically adverse, but I write out the URL on a whiteboard so that if all else fails they can simply type.

I’m still hoping for vanity URL integration though. Seems like it should happen soon.

Feature request: I’d like to be able to create a playoffs tournament that uses the same arena banks as my qualifying tournament. Right now, if I have a group match play tournament where I’ve setup arena banks, when I create a group elimination bracket tournament it starts in a state where Arena assignment is “Balanced”. I can change the arena assignment setting to Arena banks, but I have to re-enter the bank names and assign arenas to them. That’s a lot of extra clicks to perform.

Not sure if this info is in an post prior to this (I quickly looked and might have missed it), but does the “next generation” version have someplace that shows the logged in player’s current match (other than having to scroll through the list of matches to find it) and the number of games remaining in the round (without having to look through the list and count them)?
These are two features I use on The Original Software’s info screen and when trying the new and not finding it easily I switched back.

You can do less counting by first clicking the “Show only: In progress” filter at the top of the round match list. That helps a bit, but definitely isn’t exactly what you’re asking for. I agree that both of those would be great improvements to the new site.

I hear you. Though I do have to point out the old search is also sorted by date. I did try sorting search results in the new system by relevance, but there are so many tournament with similar names that the results felt super random.

The vanity URLs will come back, but in a revamped form.

I am thinking of other ways to get players to tournaments as quickly as possible. No firm plans yet, but thoughts are percolating. In the short term, the best thing to do is recommend your players create their own Match Play account (like @Zaxxoff mentions).

I honestly just plain forgot to add this filter in, but I did it now. Give MP a reload and you’ll see a “Mine” filter next to “In progress” for any round that still have games in progress. Click “Mine” and you’ll see just your matches. The filter only shows up if you’re logged in and you have claimed a player in the tournament.

Ran a Max Match Play event for my league and the players took a minute to get the hang of it, but once they did they really enjoyed it. This is a follow up to our league that used Flip Frenzy. Everyone felt it was an improvement. Had 21 players in 8 matches which only took us about an hour and a half and only two players who had to do a rematch.

Plan is to do 5 more meetings with each getting added to a running win total and having a mandatory drop of each players’ worst week. Hopefully the longer run will help with all the ties for seeding into finals. For only the results of the first one we had a 9 way tie for 3rd.

https://next.matchplay.events/tournaments/92116

The new search feels worse because it’s using an OR between search terms, while the old search used an AND between search terms. Since so many tournament names are similar, putting something like “pinball” or “basement” or “arcade” in your search terms brings back many irrelevant results even if you have some other more unique word in the search as well.

Example:
weeknight pinball on Next Match Play Events - Brings back a lot of things I’m not interested in

weeknight pinball on Old Match Play Events - Brings back exactly what I’m trying to find

I try to work around this by putting out flyers that have a QR code for the tournament and that have instructions telling people to search for weeknight (which happens to be an uncommon tournament title word) or MPB. But some players don’t read flyers or sign up for accounts, so it’s always a bit of a hassle.

I also try to make it easier to find the events by linking them all to the same Series. I don’t think the players are really aware of that, but I find it very useful so I figured I’d mention it for the benefit of other TDs.

If it’s possible to switch Next Match Play Events back to using AND I think that’d at least get it back to being as good as Old Match Play Events search.

Edit: One more trick… when I’m playing in someone else’s tournament and can’t find it, I search for the TD’s name and then go to their list of organized tournaments. This is helpful when I want to check out the arena bank before I’ve been added as a player.

Tacking onto to this: I’ve heard players say that they would like their names bolded/highlighted on the matches similar to how it was on the old matchplay.

Thank you for the feedback. New MP is indeed using a new way of doing searches (for performance reasons). In the new MP searches are done using a FULLTEXT index which is faster than the old way and has a bunch of different ways of searching.

You can still get exact matches of a phrase, but just like on google you have enclose your query in quotation marks. So “weeknight pinball” gets you the results you want: Match Play Events

I understand that’s probably too nerdy for regular humans. I’ll see if I can’t figure out a way to improve things.

The yellow highlight works the same as in the old version! Unless you found a spot where I forgot to add it in

The entire group is highlighted, but your name is no longer bolded.

What about selecting a random player? We do drawings and that would be cool to have.

Go to standings page. Note the numbers next to player names.
Speak into your phone, “Hey Siri, pick a number between 1 & (insert your number here).”
Note the random number Siri gave you.
Go back to standings, the chosen number is the player.

I know, there are lots of ways to do it. I use a random number app, but just sayin’.

Max Match Play feedback / requests

It’s pretty convenient that the Matches page differentiates between “Newer Matches” and “Older Matches”. If the Big Screen View also separated the newer matches it would make it easier for players watching the screen to find their next pairing.

Is there a known issue with the big screen view standings auto-scroll? In our tournament it was scrolling down to the bottom of the standings, but never scrolled back up to the top. I haven’t been able to reproduce it on my own laptop. I’ll try to do some debugging next time I’m at the location. My guess is it could be an issue that happens when sending the tab to a Chromecast.

We ran into a situation where one player was 2 to 4 games behind players who were in the waiting list. We didn’t realize it at the time and continued starting new matches. Eventually we realized they were very far behind and from that point forward only started new matches when they were in the waiting list to ensure they didn’t run out of available opponents. As a result the tournament dragged on at the end.

Suggestion: It’d be helpful to know whether someone playing a game is far behind before deciding to create new games. For the waiting list you already display “5 of 12 games played” for each player. I’d suggest adding a new section underneath “Players waiting” called “Players playing”. It would include all of the players from active matches, sorted by their number of games played. That would give TDs extra information they could use before deciding to create more games.

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For example, in that mockup it shows that Alice is way behind the players waiting in the queue. Having that info, the TD might check, see that Alice’s game is getting close to wrapping up and hold off on creating new games until the end of her match.

I’d love to hear other suggestions if someone else has a smarter way to handle this with the current Match Play Events features or has a better idea on how to enhance the site to help with this situation.

Max Match Play feedback / requests

I wrote about my experience with Max Matchplay first in other Forum, but got message that Thomas is active here. So better to write here.

I organised a test tournament Max Matchplay in Germany before I will use it in 3-Days tournament in March

https://next.matchplay.events/tournaments/93045/standings

We were 30 players and had 16 rounds scheduled (even rounds should always work out, even if someone is eliminated early).

The first 14 rounds went very quickly.
I was aware that if new rounds are already started, even if only 3–8 players are waiting, there will be problems.
Nevertheless, I let it happen, because I wanted to go for the worst case, to know how to get it done ideally.
In the end, almost everyone was through his 16 Games, but one player with 15 games, two with 14, and even one with 13 games.
Then we had to have someone with 13 rounds play with someone of 14 and so on. Some of the time saved was wiped out by that. Besides, it is not so fair that strong players end up with the same pairings again.

The solution from my point of view: (Sorry but I did not read all posts before)
-Only people selected by the tournament director are allowed to create new games.
-In general, do not create rounds if there are less than 1/3 of the players in the waiting list.
-From the middle of the tournament on, make sure that new rounds are only created when the player with the fewest rounds is also on the waiting list.
-Towards the end of the tournament, watch the whole thing more closely and especially start rounds only when the players who have played the least rounds are on the waiting list.

Sounds complicated, but actually it is not. In the end, you still play more rounds in relation to the playing time than with Swiss or Robin.

The mode has been very well received. I think it is great. I will implement it in the future

I think that the software should be optimized
With a total of 16 rounds, those who have played 15 rounds should not be assigned their 16th round yet, as long as there are still some with 13 and 14 rounds. It is also worth considering whether the 15th round should be drawn if there are players with 13 or fewer rounds.

I have one off-topic question I even don’t find where to post it, so I write here: How can I get email notification if someone write in this topic? I am glad if you send it by PM after solving it I will delete this part

i was also doing this from the get go on my tournament to avoid too much repeat on the arena being drawn to players that just played on them, if you have a similar amount of arenas than players.

1/3 is a decent benchmark. It allows a chance at everyone getting paired up and usually also results in people getting different machines.

I don’t know if Andreas can (or would want to) address in the software, but sounds like something that can easily be done manually by keeping an eye on the scoreboard and games played. I’m going to try this in our next monthly.

If someone hits reply directly from your post, you should get an email.

Thanks for your answers also Notification works

There is one very useful thing which should be implemented in the software.
You should be able to select for which player you want to create games.

So for example you play in total16 rounds and there are some with 12, 13, 14 and 15 rounds playd. you should be able to create games for those who have 12 , 13 or 14 Rounds played. can be chosen manualy. Should be easy to program, but would solve a lot of Work and problems

May I know the username of Thomas in TILTForums?

Are you referring to Andreas (the creator of MatchPlay and all-around stand-up dude)? → @haugstrup

You can also send feedback to play@matchplay.events and he’ll get back to you.

Thank you for the comments on Max Match Play (also you @tommyv). I’m reading them all even if I’m not responding directly. There’s been fewer than 100 Max MP tournaments created and I’m currently collecting feedback and in a little while I’ll revisit and do a round of updates for Max MP. Just want to be clear that you won’t see immediate changes – I want to see how different TDs use the format before making changes.

I can make a few clarifications of course.

The tournament organizer is always in control. They can do whatever they please.

Those may be good rules of thumb, but remember there are several ways to play a Max MP tournament. For example, if you are using it to play a round robin you want to create matches as quickly as possible (no reason to delay the tournament by waiting). Or if you are playing more matches than a round robin you can also power through the “round robin” matches as quickly as possible.

I’ve gotten some reports, but haven’t been able to establish why it happens. I wouldn’t be surprised if a chromecast is somehow involved. In the “three dots” menu you can stop the autoscrolling to sort of maybe work around the issue.

The main feedback from our event was the refresh defaults at 60 seconds. I had to use a 10 second refresh program, the refresh was superior in the old system for Flipper Frenzies as well. Other than that thou as long as I waiting for at least 8 in queue to show up then assign it worked out pretty well.

@haugstrup
Thanks for your reply

This you did not mention

I plan a 2-Days Tournament start 11.03.23 with approx 40–44 player 36 Rounds

Do you see any chance to implement this feature before?
If not, then maybe to create manual pairings instead, to create all from the waiting list?

This would make the tournament much more safe.

Sorry, I tend to ignore any suggestion that’s followed with “should be easy to program”. I react badly to those kinds of statements.

You can currently control the max number of of max active games using the “max active games” setting. If you only want two games creates and you have four games in progress, change the setting to “max 6 games”.

I will do a round of Max Match Play changes after I gather feedback from tournament organizers. I can’t say what those improvements will be (can’t make everyone happy) and I can’t say when I will be making those improvements. The list of improvements to make to all of Match Play is long and I have to weigh them all against each other when determining in what order I do things.

I am Sorry, I can understand your reaction now.

Each time to calculate and change “max active games” Is a bit work. But good to know that it is solvable this way.

We’ve just started a 6 session league with only the top 4 results counting. After out first league night last night, I notice that the standings for the series has everyone tied for 1st with 0 points in the “Result” column. Is there something I’m missing?

I chose to slow down the creation of new games when I notice some disparity of total games played. Have ran three so far for a weekly league with all being 8 total matches.

First one I didn’t pay attention and it started dragging at the end and had one rematch.

Second one I saw that a player was at 4 games as they were playing their 5th and some in the “waiting room” were on 6 or 7. I stopped making games till their game finished and dropped the max number of active games from 9 down to 5.

Third one we had lower attendance so I set it up for a max of 8 active games. Just paid more attention to make sure that we didn’t create new games if it might put some players two games ahead of some players.

Third one ran the smoothest so far for time and making sure everyone finished nearly at the same time. Has been a very fun format and have been learning a lot from running it. My league group really has been enjoying this format!

Links:
https://next.matchplay.events/tournaments/92116
https://next.matchplay.events/tournaments/92753
https://next.matchplay.events/tournaments/93410

I haven’t run a league using Match Play, but I would bet it’s because the software is dropping the two lowest nights for each person and there haven’t been three nights yet, so currently everyone is having their only league night dropped. (I’m basing this on my experience using gradebook software that would definitely handle “drop the two lowest quizzes for a student” that way if there weren’t at least three quizzes in the book.)

Ahh yes, that would make sense. The settings do say “drop two worst results” rather than “keep 4 best results” so that would explain it.

Hi @haugstrup , a couple of questions;

1. Is it possible to create some sort of “global” (within my account) arena banks, so I can easily reuse them for different tournaments?

2. It does not seem like I can manually assign banks to groups/matches? I can only choose arena banks to be randomly assigned. We have a format where players choose their bank based on previous seeding, and the banks option assigns these randomly, so I need to change all of the games.

3. If having max matchplay and number of rounds equal to round robin round (amount of players - 1) is it 100 % guaranteed that the system will make sure players not meet same players twice?

Verry low chances if you have aprox same amount of games as player

This is not correct.

@drainmorten, yes it works the way you’re expecting, guaranteed.

From the docs that @misterschu linked to:

If there are exactly the right number of matches for a round robin (like 10 players, 9 matches) then a round robin will be played. Each player will play every other player exactly once.

As a partial workaround you can adjust the number of results to drop during the season (using Next Match Play Events). Start with “No results dropped”. After the second session, change it to “Worst result dropped”. After the third session, change it to “Two worst result dropped” and leave it that way for the rest of the season. It’s not exactly what you’re looking for but it’s pretty close.

It’s not, but it’s a feature I’ve been wanting to make for literally years. Never got many votes when I added it to the feedback forums so I never prioritized it.

That’s correct, though in the new software this would be easier for me to make than in the old system. Whenever I’ve run tournaments where people can pick banks I’ve set the arena setting to “manual” and put in the arenas one-by-one

This is 100% guaranteed (not a “low chances” situation as mentioned below). One of the goals of Max Match Play was specifically to make a replacement for the old Round Robin implementation.

You can also use Max MP to run double round robin or triple round robin or quadruple round robin tournaments (and so on). Just make sure you never check the “safety valve” checkbox when creating matches.

In the document linked above there is a section called How are players paired against each other and that’s worth reading to understand how the algorithm treats the initial set of matches (up to a round robin) and the remainder matches left over.

I propose renaming “safety valve” to “emergency valve”. Not everybody using matchplay is a native English speaker, and I guarantee there’s going to be people who will check this box every round because they think this somehow “makes it more safe”.

Just a small text change for clarity, SHOULD BE EASY TO PROGRAM.

Sorry That was me who wrote that from my experience in test tournaments.

So if for example we have 40 Player and will do 38 Rounds. And I follow the rule after 2/3 of the rounds are done to change every round “max active games” that only games will be created for players who have minimum 1 game less than the player with max points there will be no duplicate opponent?

If you have 40 players, you should have 39 rounds to make it a 100 % round robin with no repeat opponents? This worked for us today. or, equal to 80 players and 38 rounds for a double round robin.

Of course I know. We will be 40-44 Players doing 38 rounds.
From when on you started to change"max active rounds"?

I know this is on here somewhere, but my search skills are failing me how do I setup a group matchplay 3 game final where half the field is eliminated each round?

I’ve always done my finals on paper and figured it was time to upgrade.

I looked in this thread over the past few months and can’t find any posts…
re: can I get next.matchplay to show Standings that include the Strengh of Opponent # for each player in standings that at least shows a decimal number on how tied match point players are differentiated?

Create playoffs: Group Elimination

Thanks group elimination was what I was missing. I kept trying to get group matchplay to do what I wanted.

Nope.

You’re only guaranteed a “perfect” tournament if the number of rounds is exactly one lower than the number of players. If your number of rounds is lower than that, it’s possible for a player to be left out in the cold with no opponents left. It’s definitely unlikely; that player has to be playing when the Create games button is clicked a few times. Here’s an example test tournament that demonstrates it. Everyone except for “Placeholder A” played 4 unique opponents but that “Placeholder A” player only played 2 opponents total and has no one left who can play any more games.

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Even from the state that tournament is in, it’s easily fixed by making it a true round robin by increasing the Duration to 5 matches for the 6 players. Placeholder A will need to play 3 more games against the players they haven’t faced yet; and there are two other players who have played Placeholder A but haven’t played against each other yet.

I think it’s unlikely that a tournament ends up in the situation I crafted here. You can help prevent it from happening by not clicking Create games unless the player(s) who are behind in game count are in the waiting list so they have a chance to catch up to the rest of the group.

I don’t understand what you mean in the rest of your post about “follow the rule”. I think maybe you misunderstand what “max active games” does. It sounds like you’re expecting it to control which players get paired based on their number of completed games. It actually just controls how many games get created each time you click the Create games button (number created = max active games setting minus number of games in progress).

and how should the IFPA grade that if say
that payer gets buys to be even?
is the full event only graded at the number of games that low player played? (and buys are deal with somehow)

the TD is forced to add an fake player that just auto loses and is forced to pay the IFPA $1 fee for that player

That player just gets f****ed and can’t make playoffs due to no fault of there own?

The TD needs to be up front at the start an player can get an revise buy (loses vs wining)

I agree that if a player ends up in this situation there’s no good fix. I’m pointing it out to highlight that it’s important to be cautious with the Create games button and delay clicking it if some active players’ number of games completed is falling behind the rest of the players.

Pick automatic tiebreaking in a matchplay tournament and this is what you’ll get. The new version doesn’t show the tiebreaking numbers, but it does break ties the same way as the old version.

I will get some tiebreaking numbers in the interface. Just have to find the time!

Just some feedback for TD’s using the preferred arena option to make them aware of a few things I noticed.

The software will allow you to set more than one game as preferred which is nice.

If you have a preferred arena, let’s say James Bond, and you are playing match play where you are alternating rounds between classics and moderns, when you draw games from classics, Bond will NOT be assigned even though it is a preferred arena. You will have to manually change one of the games to the preferred arena.

i think the workaround here is to manually set the categories and put a preferred-Bond in both.

For a tournament where you’re alternating classics and moderns, set A as moderns and put one Bond in A, then set B as classics, add a new arena to make a second Bond, and add that Bond into B.

Something that I have been wondering about with Max Matchplay is why will it only work if all players play all games? I know that playing all games should be the goal for anyone who is trying to be competitive, but I also know that players in other formats need only to have participated in half or more of the games played.

Mostly I’d like to see a change if possible to lower the strain on the tournament introduced by players who leave before completing all their games and by players who join late. Thankfully I have not dealt with either yet, but both are somewhat headache inducing. The player who leaves early removes progress from other players. Players that join late will have to catch up and play a lot of players in series which will drag the tournament out.

Almost tempted to try to work around this by creating multiple MaxMP tournaments for the same tournament. Could close and start another for adding or subtracting a player and add the results together. This would still have an issue with odd player counts needing even match numbers.

Ultimately I enjoy the format a lot, but I think I’m only going to use it for shorter formats. Namely weekly leagues of 8 or fewer matches. If more flexibility was added, then I might be willing to use it for a tournament with some 24+ matches.

I can see lots of ways for Collusion and other cheating with that. But also giving out free win for each time that now gone player is up is also not the best idea.
But maybe then they can be left as the one with no opponents left but you also don’t want to be forced to kill %50 of your TGP if some one drops at 50% of games played.

I’m not sure if I understand you correctly or if you understood me. This is how Max Matchplay works. If a player leaves all their games are removed and any player that played against them must play another game to replace it.

What I’m proposing is that the player who leaves is simply deactivated and the other players do not have to play again. Not proposing giving free wins to players matching with an absent player.

you can have an event in where let’s someone ends like deep down in dead last says Screw You Guys I’m Going Home exits the event before it’s over. And now other player have wins removed?
And there may be even be an cheating way to game the system 2 players that played each other an lot team up and the one that it helps the most to say have there loses removed has the other player quit the event?

and say what happens at the end when you have the absent player and an other LIVE player with less games then the rest of the pack?
How do you make that other live player Whole?

If everyone doesn’t play the same amount I’d assume they’d grade it as a FF and not a MMP and you would lose half your value

I disagree; I’d expect it to be graded like a head to head match play where a player chose to drop from the tournament early. Flip frenzy gets decreased TGP because in some cases the best strategy is to concede and try to play extra matches to improve your win-loss record. With Max Match Play the scoring is based on number of wins so it doesn’t have that problem.

also rush to get more games in and you can have cases in where one player had like 18-20 games and others only played 12-15

I think you have zero chance of changing Josh’s mind.

In regards to forfeits, I’ve played in 2 of these things so far and have had players concede after ball 1 in each, so thus far it’s not affecting that much.

My purpose in creating the format was to find a way where you could have a tournament where all players play the same amount of games as quickly as possible. So Max MP enforces that everyone plays the same amount of matches because that what I set out to build.

You’re under no obligation to accept players who show up late. If someone shows up 10 mins late and they’re a game behind? Sure, let them play. If someone shows up 60 mins late? You can choose to not let them play in your tournament.

As for players leaving early: The math has to work out to all players playing the same amount of matches, so that’s why matches involving the player leaving has to be removed. Otherwise the tournament wouldn’t be able to complete.

If someone leaves early out of spite, as part of some scheme to cheat(?) or because they don’t want to complete a tournament they can’t win? Again, you’re in control. You can not invite them back. I don’t see this as a software problem: It’s a people problem and you can avoid lots of headaches by having frank and honest conversations with your players about expectations.

and if some get’s sick? needs go mid way (some thing unplanned came up for them)? the event has an long delay and they can’t say? They need go with only say 1-2 games left?

well removeing wins / loss of players still in the event does have it’s own issue and can also lead to extreme over time if 1-3 players needed to play an lot of new games near the end?

I enjoy the format, but it does seem to handcuff a little. I’ve fortunately not had players leave early for any reason besides having some other obligation coming up.

Appreciate all you do for the community and your software makes tournaments a breeze. Just giving honest feedback about this new format.

Again I might try to make some adjustments that make the format more like showing late for Matchplay or leaving early. Seems like I could “easily” achieve that by creating another tournament to accommodate a late show, while also punishing them. End the first and clone and add the player. Same for a player that leaves. Penalized with not getting any more wins, yet not penalizing the players who won against the player that left. Also no need to assign any bad feelings to that player most likely had a legitimate reason to leave. Add these piecemeal tournaments together and submit meaningful games as the total average.

Though at the moment I think I’m sticking with Group Matchplay for my bigger tournaments

Edit: Actually I forgot about how that would reset the match pairings, so forget my work around

Lowering the number of games is often an option also. If someone leaves and you don’t want to play a bunch of games: Lower the number of matches in the tournament.

I appreciate the enthusiastic discussion. I’m reading everything even if I don’t respond directly. I’m making notes on a round of improvements.

Just to post my experience, from both being a player and a organizer;

At a location where random players might join but not stick out the whole event, play group matchplay, old head to head, or FF.

For a more controlled event where you know players will stay (we used max matchplay as double round robin in the norwegian championship series finals round 1 this saturday), it works VERY well. Its more of a “director frenzy” when having multiple groups and no real queue

@haugstrup
I played this new format this past weekend. During the event the number of games to be played changed. I did not see the notification in the app for this. I did see the notice that changes needed to be made in red, a player was added and games to be played needed to be changed, I would suggest something like that for any changes to the tournament like a player being added or leaving.

If I understand right, Max Matchplay may replace Flip Frenzy, Round Robin but also swiss mode which is the most popular format in Germany.

So if it is a replacement for round robin, I agree to delete all games from a player when he leave the tournament.
If it replaces Frenzy or Swiss mode, you should not delete all games, but maybe find a way to let everyone else play against each other so that everyone has the same number of games in the end.
Therefore my suggestion is that for future versions the tournament director should be able to set in the options whether all players should be deleted when a player leaves or not.

Max MP is not a replacement for a swiss-style tournament. They’re two pretty different things.

You should feel free to try. The math does not work out.

For example 40 Player 18 Round swiss could ber replaced by 18 Rounds Max Matchplay. Maybe I missed something, but the difference I see in the selection of opponents who are not balanced

You mean that there can be duplicate opponents, or you mean that in the end it can be that there is 1 Player left with 1 round less than the others?

That’s like saying you can replace an apple with an orange. Sure, they’re both fruits, but they taste completely different!

Both. I would encourage you to think through the different variations.

@haugstrup

I don’t know if this is possible, but as a player it would be nice to have your match bumped to the top of the matches pages. With the queue constantly changing I would sometimes check and not see that I had an active match until scrolling down a bit.

In the tournament I played in my last 2 games were with the same opponent with myself as player 1. If possible, maybe try to have player positions switch when/if opponents are matched up numerous times in the same tournament.

Taking a break from the lively Max MP discussion to share some new toys. WPPR estimates are now accessible with one click for all tournaments on Match Play! Open any tournament or series and click the “WPPR estimates” link and you’ll be able to see how many WPPRs are likely to be awarded to each finishing position and how many WPPRs each player in the tournament contributed to the total.

Just remember to set the TGP value to something realistic. Unfortunately the IFPA rules around TGP are too complex for Match Play to guess it for you.

You can also get WPPR estimates for tournament series. The link is at the very end of the series standings.

I have to give a huge thank you to James Todd (who built the WPPR estimator you’ve used in the past) for sparring on this feature and how to implement it. Give him some support by checking out his Pintrix app at: http://pinballmatrix.com/

ohhhh WPPRs mania!

For some reason, on my dashboard in the “Series registrations” area, I’m seeing 8 separate instances of the same series. Any thoughts on what might be causing that? I expected it to kind of go away but it’s been that way for a week or so.

@MET has answered this in another forum: it’s graded at the number of games that the player with the lowest amount of games has played.

In a way this doesn’t make a lot of sense to me, because, as you say, it’s not terribly consistent with how other H2H formats work, i.e. when pairings can’t be made, some players will play a round less than others, but it still counts.

On the other hand, I sort of get it, I think his argument is that this should never happen if the TO takes care to not let it happen, and I can get behind that. So, basically the TO pays a penalty of one or more meaningful games for doing it wrong. Would be nice if the software helped a bit in that regard, e.g. a very visible warning if any players have fallen behind too far.

There’s two things that define a Swiss tournament:

1. players are paired against players with a similar score
2. no repeat pairings

So, basically you’re saying Max Matchplay could easily replace Swiss, because the only differences are the two very things that make Swiss Swiss.

You’re in good company, though—what Matchplay has historically called “Swiss” isn’t Swiss either, and what you’re calling “balanced” here isn’t what Matchplay means when it says “balanced”. Maybe we should all together do a workshop on naming things.

no, the argument is in the rules:
“For any tournaments that have multiple paths of qualifying for the finals, we will take the SHORTEST of those paths when counting meaningful games played for that portion of the tournament.”
and yes, it’s not consistent how other h2h format works

Alright, going by the rules then, I like it. So, what if the whole tournament is only Max Matchplay, without a separate finals? Because the verbiage says “qualifying for the finals”, so that doesn’t apply then. And as a finals format itself, the TGP would be based on the expected number of games played by the winner, i.e. a single player having played a game or two less than the others would be ignored. (In the TGP Guide, MM is listed in both Approved Qualifying Formats and Approved Finals Formats.)

Sorry for going off topic, any mods please pull this out into its own thread if it escalates into a full-on WPPR nerd-off.

I don’t think you call your main with no finals as an finals format.
Also you can’t have an tie for 1st so even if no finals you may need an playoff / tiebreaker (that in that case can be seen as an finals)

For TGP purposes, a main with no finals has to be either a Qualifying Format or a Finals Format, because that’s the taxonomy the TGP Guide uses. And I know it’s not a Qualifying Format, because there’s nothing you qualify for.

I don’t see how ties should matter here. A lot of Finals Formats can have a tie for 1st—that doesn’t mean it was all just a dream and actually the whole thing wasn’t a finals at all but just the “qualifying for the tiebreaker”.

The cause is my inability to fetch the right data from a database. I’ll get it fixed soon – I got a little distracted with the WPPR estimations stuff

Even worse: Pingolf doesn’t involve golf balls at all!

Well, “that should be easy to code”!!! right? haha

Also, Ive been meaning to suggest that chunkout wppr estimator functionality. Great addition.

It would be great if the TD could set this percent as a default for anyone who goes to the WPPR estimator since most players have no idea how to come up with that percent, but the TD may have a better idea. Like it’s 8 rounds of group match play so we know it’s going to be 64%. It looks like it defaults to 100% any time that page is opened.

I like that it has “No IFPA data for:” at the bottom which may encourage TDs to enter an IFPA number for those players. What typically happens is a new player has no IFPA number until after their first tournament is submitted to IFPA, then the TD never enters the IFPA number for that player in their future tournaments. I try to point this out to local TDs and help them add the IFPA numbers for newer players.

I really like this feature, and I like the way you implemented the feature, however people I challenged couldn’t find their way to the page with the challenge, they didn’t know I had challenged them. However, this doesn’t account for the falloff in usage you describe.

This strategy doesn’t work if one is awarded -1 for a loss?

I’m not sure this is a good idea, lowering the number of matches mid way through. Players who are not in the lead will get upset because now they have less opportunity to catch up, it seems arbitrary and unfair to me. If the TD announces a tournament cut off time prior to tournament commencement and then manage the number of rounds accordingly then everyone knows what to expect.

On the subject of players leaving early, they are likely to be the ones who have lost. This means that other players wins are deleted, which won’t make them happy. I guess that is the downside of this format. but on the whole I really like it.

you are right with 1. but there should be no repeat pairings.
In my 3-days tournament which I organize soon, I will replace the Swiss-tournament with max matchplay.
Of coursse in swiss you play primary against others which have similar score, but if we are 42 players doing 38 rounds without duplicate pairings will be not a big difference to swiss but 20%-40% more games in same time period.

If you’re playing 38 rounds with 42 players, by all means, use MM and not Swiss.

Actual Swiss parings are dreadfully unsuited to such a high number of rounds. You could easily run into a situation where it’s impossible to avoid repeat pairings.

All I was saying is that MM doesn’t replace Swiss, they are actually quite different, as is reflected in the fact that MM is perfectly suitable for your situation, while Swiss doesn’t make a lot of sense there.

@umbilico
I organize pinball tournaments almost since 20 years now.
We played already swiss long time before it was played in the US. It was Minimum 2007 (And already real swiss without duplicate opponent)
I played IFPA World championships till 2013 and remenber when Top Player in the world playd first time Swiss in Germany, they liked it .
As till last year we needed only 17 Rounds + Finals for 100% TGP I never tried with much more rounds.
In march will be first tournament which I organize with 40-44 Players to reach 180% so 36-38 Round MM Saturday and Finals on Sunday.
Next Friday will test again with 15-20 players and will use the trick to change “max simultan Games” that in end I hope all will be ended smothy this time

17 rounds Swiss is fine for 40 players, 37 rounds isn’t. Just so you know what I’m talking about, consider a tournament with 6 players, and the following pairings in the first 3 rounds:

Round 1: 1 vs 4, 2 vs 5, 3 vs 6
Round 2: 1 vs 5, 2 vs 6, 3 vs 4
Round 3: 1 vs 6, 2 vs 4, 3 vs 5

Round 4: ?

You’re going to find that it’s impossible to avoid repeat pairings in round 4.

Swiss isn’t made for running “almost round robins”. The closer you get to a round robin, the more likely it is you’re going to run into a situation like the above, where you can’t avoid a repeat pairing. I mean, Matchplay will let you do that, but then technically that’s not Swiss anymore.

So, just run MM for those “almost round robins”, and you’re gonna be fine.

It is not like you write,
we played already with 20 Players 17 rounds no duplicate.
Swiss try to find players which have similar points, but if it dont find same points it takes next oponent which is nearest possible
Anyway you misunderstand. I switch from Swiss to MM next tournament

If it’s not like I write, tell me the Round 4 pairings in my example then.

Of course it’s possible to play 17 rounds with 20 players without duplicates, that’s not the point. The point is, it’s also possible to run into a situation where duplicates can’t be avoided. And since having no duplicates is one of the two main rules that define what a Swiss tournament is, Swiss is not well suited for this sort of setup.

40 players 17 rounds strictly swiss
sure also no duplicate if it would be expand to 35 rounds
you missunderstand pairings in swiss. It will always find next possible opponent which you did not played against. (Will chust try to find the one which is closest to your points)
https://next.matchplay.events/tournaments/71008/stats
anyway we dont need to diskuss anymore.
I will stop running swiss , round robin and frenzy and using MM

Sure. You sound pretty convinced it’s impossible to be forced into repeat pairings when running a large number of rounds. You know what would convince me? If you told me a valid Round 4 pairing in my example above.

@umbilico maybe you are right. I dont want to spent my time now to create swiss game with 6 players to simulate and find out if it works or not. In theorie if round robin works with 6 also swiss should work with 6
I just wrote about my experience. I never had duplicate in swiss
but I had never Games aprox amount of players.
and if MM works well also in the end I dont have any reason to play swiss

It has always been my understanding that “true Swiss” tournaments work as @pinmanic says. The rule is that you always play the opponent with the closest record to yours that you have not yet played. In this way it tries to approximate a round robin as well as possible. When the number of rounds reaches the number at which everyone plays everyone, it is now identical with a round robin. I have a tournament I run every year that is intended to be a round robin, but in reality I know that will take too long, so I run it as a tournament with Swiss pairings that runs until a certain time, in order to get an “almost round robin.” I have used Challonge to do this in the past specifically because it handles Swiss in the way pinmanic describes; it will not duplicate opponents until everyone has played everyone. It was my understanding that “strict Swiss” also does this in Matchplay, but I could be wrong as I have not used Matchplay to run my pseudo-round-robin since it introduced strict Swiss (as opposed to what Matchplay’s original “Swiss” which isn’t actually Swiss).

“Strict Swiss” (or “actual Swiss”, as I prefer to call it) does do that, but as I said, there are situations in which repeat pairings cannot be avoided, and the closer you get to round robin, the higher the probability for that.

If you do an actual round robin, you’re defining all the parings for the whole tournament in advance, so no problem there. In Swiss, parings obviously depend on game results, so you’re not in control and can’t prevent the tournament from running into a dead end at some point.

I sound like a broken record at this point, but if you’re sure dead ends are not possible, and want to convince me, too, just show me how Round 4 in my example above works out with no repeat pairings.

I would love for this not being the case, because the whole point of Swiss is approximating the results of a round robin by skipping all the pairings for which the outcome seems obvious. So, how cool would it be if you’d be guaranteed to actually reach a round robin if you play enough rounds. You’re not, though.

MM doesn’t have this problem, because there are no rounds. In case there are no unique pairings available for a player, you can just wait until there are, guaranteeing that you’re able reach a round robin at some point.

If you really do want to play Swiss “almost round robins”, Matchplay is actually your best choice of software, because in case of a dead end, it will just give you repeat pairings instead of erroring out, as other Swiss apps might. That was originally done so the “Strict Swiss” pairing algorithm can also be used for Knockouts, but I guess it might be useful here, too.

Obviously I have to think it through more carefully. It’s not immediately obvious to me why that would happen, but I haven’t studied your example closely enough. It’s never come up for me in several years of running a tournament that way with Challonge. Edit to add: I am actually planning to use Max Matchplay to run my pseudo-round-robin this year so that’s good to know.

It’s easy to see if you look at it like that:

There are basically two groups of players,

Group A: players 1, 2, 3
Group B: players 4, 5, 6

After 3 rounds, everyone in group A has played against everyone in Group B, so in round 4, both Group A and Group B players are forced to play against somebody from their own group. Since there’s 3 players in each group, that’s not possible, though.

I don’t think this sort of thing is actually likely to happen in a long running Swiss tournament, but it’s definitely possible. Since in those situations, there’s a choice to be made which players get a repeat pairing, the way “Strict Swiss” handles this in Matchplay is give repeat pairings to the lowest ranked players, so it doesn’t lose ranking resolution in the top end.

Yes, I get it now. In the past I had naively assumed that however many rounds you ran, you would just get partway through a round robin, but with the more useful matches prioritized. I see now that the way that Swiss does pairings, because it disrupts the methodical order of a round robin, can have this result. It had just never come up for me and I hadn’t thought of it happening.

I do like that MM with strict Swiss can do a better job of approximating round robin, and that’s going to be my format for my next round robin. Heck, since MM does matches so much more efficiently, I might be able to run an actual complete round robin for the first time!

there’s actually a formula for the optimal number of rounds in Swiss System:
R ≈ 0,2·T + 1,4·n (always round up)
R: #rounds
T: #participants
n: #spots you want to play out
f.e with 32 participants and 4 players qualifying for the finals 12 rounds are optimal.
In other words the first and last 4 players in the standings are placed “correctly” after 12 rounds, all others aren’t yet.

I used Match Play challenge in 2019 against friends for multiple reasons.

Sometimes we could not finish our 7 game series in a single night, so it was a great way to keep track of who won.

We also enjoyed that ratings were affected by this.

MP challenges are a great way to track grudge and money matches as well. Please consider keeping it for Next.

Feedback on the WPPR estimator.

• First of all, I love it! It’s super fast and it already knows what tournament I’m looking at. While I loved to use the chunkout one, those are two killer improvements right off the bat.

• Add my vote to the request to let organizers set the default value to show to users. I think it would be nice to still let anyone override that to keep it flexible though. It’s more important to let the player enter in the TGP they want to see, but if you can also let the organizer supply the default that’s a big improvement.

  On top of that, I think it’s actually an important feature. I’ve asked local players what they think of the feature and they’ve told me they love it because they get to see the points they can get. These are players who are excited to get 0.4 WPPRs. But they don’t really understand TGP. So I worry that their excitement about the feature will turn to disappointment when they realize they’re getting half of the predicted WPPRs for a tournament with an actual TGP of 48%.

• I’d love to see you incorporate the standings from the playoffs into the WPPR Distribution table! I’ve always found it frustrating that there’s nowhere to see the standings from qualifying and finals combined. I understand that you can’t just replace the playoff standings with info from the finals; but this seems like the perfect place to put a combined view.

• It’d be nice for it to account for ties. I see that you have a banner with a note about this. Ties are something that the IFPA has a clear algorithm for, but it’s not intuitive (in my opinion). So if you are able to incorporate ties into this feature it’d be pretty valuable by showing how they work. Tie rules are summarized here.

• You currently list these stats at the top of the page:

  • WPPR value
  • TGP percentage
  • Players

  I propose changing the order and the phrasing to:

  • Players
  • TGP percentage (estimated by TD)
  • WPPR value for 1st

  The order implies cause and effect. Players are who showed up, there’s not much control over that. TGP is sometimes influenced by player count (e.g. strikes formats). WPPRs is influenced by both player count and TGP. All three fit above the fold, so I think it’s still ok to list WPPRs last even though it’s the most important of the three. Obviously only include “(estimated by TD)” if you go with the first feature suggested in this post and if the TD has provided a value. “For 1st” is just to help clarify how that is used for players who are new to thinking about tournament points value.

And just to reiterate, if you don’t make any of these changes it’s still a great feature.

I just want to say these table sorts are awesome.

Sorting by Seed makes things so much easier for me for Activating/Deactivating

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How do you find nearby locations on the new version?

And why can’t 2 TDs use the same location on either version? They each have to create the same location, so it shows up twice in the nearby locations (on the old version).

We are in the midle of a MM Match
https://next.matchplay.events/tournaments/94764
I just saw that “max active games” is maximum 10" So with 28 Players to use this “trick” is useless right?
So I can use that to change max active games maybe in the End of the tournament right?
Any reason why it is only 10 games maximum?
For me for a Tournament with more than 24 Players it makes no sense

Are you saying that when max games is set to no limit it only creates 10? Or are you wishing there was a way to create a limit higher than 10?

I have always used the limit to create a bit of a queue, but my group is between 20 to 26 for most of our weekly leagues running this format.

I mean, wishing there was a way to create a limit higher than 10
we were 30 player not 28 just 2 left the tournament as it took much more time than expected.
maxgames with 10 if you are 30 players steals a lot of time.

@haugstrup is there any chance that in next 4 weeks the possible amount of “max active games” will be increased?

Out of my experience, 10 is good if you run tournaments up to 24 Players.
But with 40 people, I fear to risk.
In tournaments, I organize we “have good players but we have also beginners”. So the difference of completed games per player is much bigger than if you have “good players and average players”.

Does anyone have experience with max matchplay with more than 40 Players and more than 30 rounds?

That feature hasn’t been migrated to the new MP yet, nor have I decided what it’ll look like over there.

In the old MP locations from two TDs isn’t connected in any way so you end up with duplicates. Wanting to solve this problem is why none of the location features have been migrated yet. In the new MP new locations you create are connected to the Pinball Map and Scorbit databases over pinball locations and that will potentially allow for de-duplication.

I can never provide timelines for any changes to Match Play.

I like these suggestions, @tommyv!

ok it is understandable

Anyone has experience with MM with more than 40 player and more than 30 rounds?

Thanks @haugstrup for the things you have done with a Matchplay improvements.
As a streamer this has made my life a lot easier. I didn’t think I was going to like the changes but it’s a huge improvement with the broadcast view and other elements.
Thank you!

If you use the randomizer to pick a random number:

1. It doesn’t seem to be inclusive of the upper bound. Entering 10 will return a number from 1 to 9. Entering 2 will always return 1. Entering 1 will give “No result.”

2. If you enter a non-whole number or a number less than 1 it goes to an error page. For example, 10.5 goes to an error page.

3. If you enter letters and Go! it generally goes to the error page.

4. You can enter hexadecimal numbers using the prefix 0x, so if you enter 0x2A you can get a random number between 1 and 42 (actually 41, see point 1 above). If the user enters a hexadecimal number the result should really be given in hexadecimal also!

5. Binary numbers can be entered using the prefix 0b. For example, 0b1100 will be the same a decimal 12. Again results are returned in decimal rather than binary!

So you’re the one who made my error reporting system go off! Thanks for the testing – I don’t think I’ll be returning hex values, but I will fix the errors

For a 4 player finals with multiple games the documentation says:

Group elimination bracket tournaments require at least eight players to fill a bracket. Some smaller tournaments only advance four players to finals. In that case, the finals should not be configured as a group elimination bracket. Instead, choose group match play playing multiple matches per round but only a single round. This will effectively provide you with the same result as if you played a group elimination bracket with only four players.

Is there a way to get a tiebreaker game to display like with 8 or 16 player group elimination brackets? Otherwise it will not “effectively provide you with the same result.”

There is not

Hello. I have been using the new version for about a month now.

Where are the tiebreaker numbers displayed? I needed to see them at an event, and ended up having to go back to the old version to find them.

Thank you!

If you are referring to the “automatic tiebreakers”, they no longer show in the new version in its current iteration.

Good timing. I started on them today

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Okay, here we go. Tiebreaker values are displayed using the same format as in the old MP, but in the new version you can click on the magic numbers and get explanations for what they represent.

Here’s a short video from a Head-to-head match play style tournament using the standard tiebreaker:

But different tournament formats display different values. Here’s what the info dialog looks like in a target match play tournament:

Screen Shot 2023-02-15 at 22.50.551028×602 77 KB

Not all tournament formats have tiebreaker values visible. For example, any tournament that has bespoke ways of building the standings (brackets of all sorts, amazing race etc.) won’t display the tiebreaker values.

Hi Andreas,
I did a lot of testing on Max Matchplay back in Nov, finally looking to put it into practice in a few months.

One thing I miss from the old flip frenzy Big screen view was the list of recent results.

At the moment big screen view is rather empty especially for smaller events (ours are around 24 players). It would be great if we could see the recent results again.

Is there any reason behind it’s omission in the newer version?

I’m doing a round of updates for MAx MP before too long and the big screen view experience will get a fresh coat of paint then as well

Quick notes from a 8-Game Max MatchPlay from last night.

• 18 players, 8 machines available
• Letting the queue build up to 8+ players before re-drawing was the way to go
• We got to a point near the end where I had a few people at 8 games (all done), 7 games and in the queue, and 6 games and playing an active game.
• I waited until those players with 6 games finished their active game so that everyone in the queue was either at 7 or 8.
• The last game involving people with 6 games was Brandon vs. Dennis
• I drew the next draw, and everyone EXCEPT Brandon and Dennis got drawn
• I had to use the release valve feature which forced Brandon and Dennis to play against each other again

I’m sharing this because I don’t know if it was just bad luck that Brandon/Dennis had to get paired again, or if there was something about the fact that they just entered the queue that prevented them from being considered for the next draw.

https://next.matchplay.events/tournaments/95240/stats/matches

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My guess is that it’s a bit of bad luck. I haven’t looked at the tournament, but if Brian/Dennis had played everyone left in the tournament (their only remaining unfaced opponents had all already completed 8 matches) then Brian/Dennis would not be assigned another opponent until the release valve is used.

The waiting room is always processed by sorting players by number of games completed (and secondarily by amount of time in the waiting room). But if there is no “perfect” opponent to be found the player will be skipped (unless the release valve is used).

Had you been able to recognize this situation (little chance without the software helping you), then you could’ve used the release valve earlier and Brian/Dennis could’ve avoided playing each other twice in a row. They still would’ve ended up with repeat opponents, just different ones.

@tommyv if you reload, TDs can set the default TGP value for WPPR estimates. The other suggestions are good and I have them on a list for a later date. I can’t fit them in now.

It looks great, thanks!

If you do get around to the other suggestions at some point, I think it may be helpful to also let the TD to decide to “Show WPPRs for all positions” or “Show WPPRs based on ties”. I was at a tournament recently where the finals was run on paper rather than in Match Play Events. If you showed ties from qualifying it wouldn’t include all of the point values that actually ended up getting used because after finals the ties ended up across different positions.

Or just don’t do that one and keep it the way it is where WPPRs are displayed for every position without taking ties into account. That leaves it up to the person viewing the page to know how ties affect the distribution of points but at least they have all of the information.

An improvement I’d like to see for ease of IFPA submission, and now with the WPPR estimates, is amending the unqualified rankings for finals. At the moment if you have a qualifying and finals you will want to show WPPR calculated from qualifying.

It all works for me as a tournament director, but I think it confuses players a bit unless I walk them through how it works.

I second adding the results of matches to the big screen view. Sometimes players notice errors on the big screen and they can be corrected before the next round. Some players believe it not don’t use their mobile device and rely on the big screen.

You probably already know that it highlights the TD’s current game and their standing on the big screen. I guess that is a bug unless it’s a feature.

For average arena game times it would be more useful to be average game time per player. A 3-player game going 30 minutes is different than a 4-player game going 30 minutes, and it’s not apparent which games may have had 3 players. Or it could be normalized to a 4-player game time if most games are 4 players. For example, 30 minutes on a 4-player game of Rush and 19 minutes on a 3-player game of Rush would average to 7 minutes per player or the equivalent of 28 minutes per 4-player game.

Anyone else seeing this on iOS, safari, portrait mode when submitting results? I am the TD, so not sure that’s what causes it or what.

Last night on most occasions, to make the selection I wanted, I had to push above where I wanted.

If I wanted to select this:

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I had to push here:

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I believe if I were to turn my phone landscape, the issue would go away, but not totally sure. iPhone 12 I believe.

Yep, I have seen some of our members have the same problem and have to default to adding with our tablet.

Did you guys figure out watch exactly is causing it? Trying to help @haugstrup pinpoint it.

Honestly, I was so busy running our last event a couple of players had troubles inputting their scores via IPHONE so I told them to enter on tablet. The other issue I have run into is if you submit results via Next and the old in the same tournament it can cause some confusion on the final standings. Other than that works really slick, the members really like the notifications to start true next round.

I vote we kill the old site, or at least not let people use it so some of that is taken care of.

Weirdness ensues if you have registration setup for pay on the new one. If they register via the old, they get added without paying I believe.

Original recipe is still superior to 2.0 for tournament searches.

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@chuckwurt you can’t pay for a premium subscription on the new site yet (and it’s my own personal nightmare figuring out how/if I can transfer subscriptions). It would be a poor financial decision for me to kill the old site right now

You can still tap directly on the names to enter 1st, 2nd, 3rd like the old way. Is there the same weirdness that way?

Whatever my current rates are, double em. Haha

Would it be terrible to just cancel all premium subscriptions effective the date of the change, and make everyone start anew on the new website? I know that screws over people that just renewed, but I don’t think it would be that bad.

Yes.

Well, I’m a nice guy and might end up doing the nice version of that. Your current subscription counts on the new version, but once it runs out you have to renew manually on the new version

In knockout tournaments when you go to a player’s page that shows all their completed matches it shows their finish positions all wrong. 4th when they won the game, like it’s the reverse order or something. Some games have no position.

I did not know that. Boy do I feel foolish now.

yes we had a strike tournament recently and a player brought that up to me. thank you for reminding me

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I just looked at an old knockout tourney and I definitely see some wrong results listed in the player “all matches” section but then a bunch of them appear to be displayed correctly as well.

Fellas, you have to give me a fighting chance. If you include links to the tournaments I can fix problems. If you do not include links, I cannot.

Fair point, I just opened up this 4 strike KO tournament: 84334 (Match Play Events) and I notice that it’s missing a bunch of that player area “all matches” placement information entirely. I also have this 10X Progressive Strike: 78997 (Match Play Events)

https://next.matchplay.events/tournaments/94271
Round 9
Marcel > All Matches > displays 4th but should display either 0 strikes or 1st / 2nd, I’m not sure which.
resultPositions and resultPoints are inconsistent.

https://next.matchplay.events/tournaments/92702/matches
Round 9
Deadpool, Scott should be listed as 2nd but the All Matches display shows blank.

Thank you for that,

the correct results are Michael and Marcel not getting strikes, and it did report this properly to the standings, but when marcel clicked on the match, it showed the results incorrect

Something buggy happened with our group elimination finals. It pulled in the wrong players to Finals.
https://next.matchplay.events/tournaments/95111/matches

Could it be it only counted the results of the last game in each group? The 2 players that advanced both finished 1st and 2nd in the last game of the first round. Or maybe that’s just a coincidence.

@nudgey you somehow ended up with duplicate results in the database for three games. I’ve deleted those duplicate results. Can you try to delete the “finals” round and then create it again. I have a feeling that will advance the right players

Alright, I think I’ve fixed those knockout displays on the “All matches” tab. Thank you for the reminder that I really don’t like how I setup knockout tournaments in the database 8 years ago

Bingo. It looks correct now. Could the duplicate results have been caused by the fact that we were entering results in on matchplay.events instead of next.matchplay.events?
Thank you!

Yes, that could absolutely be the case!

Any chance that the logic for “Dropped results” in a series could be modified to function more like “best X results count”?

We have our league set up so we’ll have 6 total nights with worst 2 results dropped. But after 2 league nights, any points earned so far were a player’s “worst 2 results” so everyone ends up tied in 1st place in the standings with 0 points for the league.

I currently just have it set to “no results dropped” and will change that when we’ve played our 5th League night as a workaround, but just figured it would make more sense to function that way. But maybe I’m missing something, I often do!

Looking at my rating changes graph… I’m assuming the P50/75/95/99 values are percentiles, and if so, is that percentile tied to the rating or the lower bound?

The percentiles are based on the rating value

Anyone know where external event submission is located in next?

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I haven’t moved that feature over yet… I’m a little surprised to see someone needing to use it!

I would love to have a QR code on the tournament overview page which I can show to other players so they can pull up the same tournament quickly.

A QR code on the big screen view would be great for players for sure…

Running a FF 1B at the moment. TD has requested I Tell you that pick winner is not available in NEXT.

https://next.matchplay.events/tournaments/96003/frenzy

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@haugstrup I love that cloning a tournament also copies the default TGP estimate.

I’m also loving the Exact matches checkbox option on the search. It works really well for Tournaments and Series.

I think Exact matches doesn’t work quite how I’d expect for verified players. If I search for Escher Lefkoff I get no results when Exact matches is checked. I’m guessing it does a search against first name and unions it with a search against last name. Could you also union in a search against FirstName LastName?

Ah, thanks for that. The database is setup a little weird for user search and I didn’t mean to add the “exact matches” checkbox to user search (but forgot that was my plan). I’ve removed the checkbox. Once I get to shut down the old MP I can rework the database and make user search behave more like the other searches

https://next.matchplay.events/tournaments/94269/arenas

@haugstrup One thing i forgot to mention, we were having a tournament a few weeks ago and we had enough games that we could alternate games between rounds so people were not playing right next to each other. we grouped one bank of games as category A and another bank as Category B and were were going to alternate between them each round.

When we were using the Next.matchplay.events software, it would not let us start a round choosing those categories, it would give me some sort of error. But when i would start a new round from the old match play software it would let me start a round and it would let me choose the proper category.

I am wondering if this was a glitch in the new software or if i just did not do the proper steps.

I was also wondering if you can still make banks with the new software? so you do not have to put the games into different categories which was a bit more tedious, for example having a classics bank and a modern bank

It’s hard to say what the cause for your troubles might have been this far after the fact. Next time I would love it if you could let me know a bit sooner and include screenshots of the error. There shouldn’t be any problems alternating categories when creating rounds.

You can make banks in the new version. Enable banks for the tournament and a “Banks” tab will appear. Switch to that to create banks.

okay i will definitely try to be more on the ball.

so i just tried a test tournament with the banks feature, i set up a modern bank and a classics bank, i used it for a group match play and when i went to start round it would not let me choose the bank, it just had the regular options. I am not sure if i am misunderstanding the use of the banks feature, maybe it is used only when you want a group to play more then one game in a round.

i am trying to figure out a good way to alternate each round, for example everyone plays moderns one round and classics for round 2

We do that for our league but I use the A and B feature to assign each machine. Then when you start your round you pick only A or only B for the rounds you have. Works super slick IMO…

Okay that is what i did and i didn’t mind it, i was just seeing if there was a way of making preset banks or something instead of going into each game and changing the category. i was thinking that maybe there was a way (for example) make a group A and go and choose a bunch of games that you want in group A and a bunch of games for Group B, i was thinking something similar like when you are adding your arenas or players and you can add multiple at a time (which is a really handy feature of the new software that i really like )

@haugstrup, any ideas why there might be a difference in Ties scores between the old and the new version?

I’m watching a tournament right now where they had to play a shootout, because a player was assuming he’s qualified, using the old version, but he wasn’t in the new one, and they didn’t know which one to trust.

Standings (old): WCPP Main Saturday Life on Mars 4 March '23 Head To Head • Standings • Match Play Live
Standings (new): Match Play Events

Old ones seem way lower.

Yes, that is exactly how banks work. For example, three games per round. Create a bunch of banks with three games each. Then when the software chooses an arena, it will choose a bank (balanced, random, etc)

If no automatic tie breaking is used, how is the order of players in the standings determined, if they have the same amount of points/strikes?

Trying to figure out whether it’s fair to set player order in shootouts according to the player order on the standings page.

I believe it is random if you refresh they change order so no real good way of doing it. This is why I use strength of schedule whenever I can for tiebreakers.

They don’t for me, and they are the same in both the old and the new version for me.

I probably wouldn’t use the standings for player order, myself, but I’d like to know whether it’s deterministic in some way, so I can give an informed recommendation.

The new software is great, thank you!
’
I have a feature request for Series, the series I run compiles scores where it’s the sum of a player’s best 2 tournaments in the series (with 3rd best, 4th best, etc being used as tie breakers if necessary). The only options that exist right now are to drop x amount of lowest scores, not take x amount of highest scores, but since all players might have played a different amount of events in the series I’m not sure if the drop feature will work for me.

Thanks!

If a player doesn’t participate in an a series event, they are treated as having 0 points from it. So basically, if you take the total number of events in the series minus the 2 that you wanna keep and make that the number of “worst results to drop,” then the final standings should be what you want. For example, 4 total nights, top 2 count, “drop 2 worst” should function properly for you in the end.

There will be an issue with the way the standings are done and displayed until the end of the league though. I’ve mentioned the issue before, at least as I understand it to work. (Match Play Events: The Next Generation - #370 by Shaub)

@haugstrup I ran into some weird behavior while creating a finals. I chose Group elimination bracket with 12 players. I confirmed the right 12 players were displayed (after tiebreaker adjustments) and I clicked to create the tournament. It ended up only adding 9 players.

This tournament allowed for public registration and the organizer had several duplicate players and some “retired” players in their player list. I’m guessing that one of those three factors caused the issue.

I manually added the players to the finals and made corrections to the player seeding.

I also went into that organizer’s player list and merged the duplicates that I could find. That may make it harder for you to diagnose what went wrong (sorry).

I’m just passing the info along in case you want to look into it as a possible bug.

Qualifying
Finals

Feature suggestion

Please consider adding two new settings to Group elimination bracket.

Standings for eliminated players

• Standings based on points
• Standings based on elimination round

Seeding after first round

• Reseed based on original relative seeding
• Reseed based on previous round points
• Use bracket structure from original seeds

Current behavior is “Standings based on points” and “Reseed based on original relative seeding”. A player complained to me recently about the incongruity between those two behaviors. For eliminated players, the points they earned are compared against those earned by players eliminated from other groups and the standings and ties are based on “points earned” rather than “round eliminated”. But for players who advance their points have no effect on their seeding in the next round. In particular this can have a big effect for the players advancing from the round of 12 to the semifinal.

I’m happy to add more context and examples if those proposed options aren’t clear.

"For eliminated players, the points they earned are compared against those earned by players eliminated from other groups and the standings and ties are based on “points earned” rather than “round eliminated”.

I just did a test and the behaviour for me appears to be final standings based first on “round eliminated” and then ties broken by points earned in a players’ final round. So even if a player knocked out in the semi-finals was able to accumulate more points in their matches than a player knocked out in the finals, the player that made the finals would still place higher, regardless of points earned.

It may not be directly set out in MatchPlay but if a TD doesn’t want to break ties for players eliminated in the same round, they can submit the results to the IFPA in a way that reflects that.

Saturday we plaid MAX-Matchplay with 26 Player 36 rounds. Started 10:30 AM finished around 10:30 PM. For many players, first time to play this format and almost everyone liked it.

As “Max active games” only support 10 at the moment after 10 Rounds, we reduced the amount of machines to 12. So each time we create games, 2 players with the highest amount of rounds was not playing. Just after round 32 we set “Max active games” to smaller amount.

I know, one of the ideas of MM should be like “endless round-robin” if you take off 1 player all his games are deleted. I understand well if you do this with small amount of rounds it is fine. As we played 36 rounds, chances are high that for example there are players after 30 rounds they see they will not qualify for finals, find any excuse to quit. That means TGP will go down for everyone.
My suggestion would be in future release of MM that tournament director should have an option that if a player decides to quit after playing 50% of all rounds, if all games should be deleted or not. Just need to tell the person who want to quit, that he may only leave the tournament after pair rounds (Like 28, 30, 32, etc) So it will be sure that in the end all players have the same amount of games in the end of the tournament. So it is fair for everybody and no TGP is lost.

This weekend when I was trying to claim my player in a tournament on my iPhone 12 mini I found it impossible to click on the link at the bottom of the player profile to do so. I would have to drag the panel up to see the link but it would drop back below the bottom of the screen when I let go and you can’t click on links when you’re dragging. Putting the button higher up in the panel would be helpful.

Sorry, that’s what I meant as well. It would have been more clear if I had said:

Yes, reporting the results to the IFPA as ties is definitely an option even with no changes to the software.

I chose to not do that in this case because I would rather have one annoyed player instead of risking annoying more players by potentially downgrading their final standings from what they could see in match play events. But with good upfront communication I think that’s a good option.

I was more leaning towards leaving the standings on the default “Standings based on points [and elimination round]” and switching to “Reseed based on previous round points” if an option like that were to become available in the future.

This same kind of scrolling problem happens frequently in the player all matches fly out panel too. It’s not as bad there because it’s just hiding information rather than preventing interaction.

@haugstrup maybe an uncomplicated/inelegant fix would be to add an extra element at the bottom of these displays to create a little buffer?

he has added space for this reason already but I think a bunch of extra space at the bottom would help this. I had notified him a while back about that feature/bug so it’s probably an easy fix but then I am not a tech guy!

Well, there’s either a bug in the old implementation or in the new implementation. Can you help me out and determine which one? Or make a small tournament where the numbers are more easily verified manually?

I don’t remember but it’s either random or in the order of their player id number.

Skimming the code the only reason players would be filtered out is if the player is deactivated in the tournament.

I’m very hesitant to add options like this to group brackets. Group brackets are built like PAPA finals and while a bit wonky in certain choices it’s a format with a long history of working in a very particular way. The MP version works the same way as the version in Karl’s Never Drains software and there’s value in that.

I increased the padding on the info panels that slide out. I hope that has resolved your issue

I wasn’t able to reproduce this in a simple test tournament, but I counted out the points for a player, and the new version seems to have it right.

Well, that’s good news for me at least! I do nothing and you can tell your players to not look at the old MP.

Isnt it time to just put the old site out of it’s misery? It feels cruel at this point just leaving it on life support.

Anyone know if the new site will/should work on iOS13? A player in my events is running that on their phone (can’t update ), so they’ve been sticking with the old MP site because of the incompatibility. I imagine this is probably hard to test because almost no one is still running that version.

No one wants to put it out of its misery more than me. I need to move subscription management to the new site and that’s unfortunately a rather complex procedure where I can’t cut corners because it deals with peoples’ money

I don’t test and don’t care about software as out of date as iOS 13. I would not be surprised it the new version does not work. One of the reasons I can build features faster on the new site is that I’m taking advantage of newer web technologies.

If your friend’s device can run iOS 13, it can also run iOS 15. So step one is for your buddy to upgrade that far.

Some things that bug me on the new one:

it’s VERY difficult to find tournaments that I’m not playing in. Anyway to make this easier? And once we find one that we plan to keep checking on, is there anyway to make it easy to get back to it?

On IOS, you cannot tap the top of the browser bar and warp back to the top like every other site. Can that be added?

For what it’s worth, I think if at all possible it would be preferable to not kill it, but to keep it running on a subdomain like for instance reddit does. Of course without any support—if you want to use it, you’re on your own. There’s features people like in the old and miss from the new version that you might not even be aware of.

At recent tournaments, I’ve been asked by multiple people to talk to you about reimplementing some of those. I told them to ask you themselves, but I guess this is as good a place as any to bring those up:

• The main one is the Info tab showing your current match front and center if you’re logged in. The experience for a lot of people has been this in the old version: when a new round starts, they’ll refresh the info tab (or go to the info tab if they’ve been looking at standings before) to find out what they’re playing.
  
  I have to admit, I don’t even know how this is supposed to work in the new version. I understand that on the Matches tab, there’s a Mine filter, but how are you supposed to refresh it? Both browser refresh and the Refresh button on the page reset the filter, so it seems you have to reactivate it every time? (I know email notifications are a thing, too, but most people don’t seem to like them very much and don’t have them on).

• A lot of people loved the always-visible status bar at the bottom of the screen that tells you how many matches are still going on. Between rounds, they might move between Standings or Matches or check out a particular player or whatever, but in the old version they could still always keep an eye on how far along the round was.

I mean it’s yours to decide whether you want to reimplement those or whatever, I’m just telling you that there’s a non-negligible number of people out there who keep using the old version specifically for those two features, and they will be disappointed if the old version disappears all of a sudden without a replacement they would consider sufficient.

I agree, we had a situation the other evening, where a few players hadn’t claimed their player yet in matchplay and i had a hell of a time trying to find the tournament for them on their devices.

one thing i liked with the old matchplay for searches. Was when you clicked the I’m playing in a tournament and got the main search bar, you could just enter the matchplay ID # and it would come up right away. I find with the new software if you enter the matchplay ID # that this does not help you find the event.

I found that way was the easiest to help new players find the event in the software

It was nice to be able to see active tournaments near you too. That helps find things quickly.

Reload your browser and you can change the series configuration to “Keep best results” in addition to the existing “Drop worst results”

What makes it hard? I’m not trying to be difficult, I’m trying to understand. There’s a big old search box and if you type in the name of the tournament it’ll show up.

I hear you on the “hard to get back to”. I’ve got some ideas around that

That’s not going to happen unless you give me the same revenue numbers reddit has (so like 100 million dollars a year). The old site uses too many resources (so it slows down the new version in addition to being slow in itself)

If people don’t tell me, I don’t know. It’s a simple as that. If something is keeping you on the old version right now is the time you should be emailing play@matchplay.events because the old version will go away. Complaining to the person next to you at a tournament does not work. You have to tell me personally. I am not a mind reader.

It’s supposed to work like this: You click the “mine” filter and you click the “refresh” button. The filters are not supposed to reset, but I cannot fix issues unless you tell me about them. Match Play is software with a million features. I have to rely on people reporting issues.

I can understand wanting that feature, but it’s unfortunately one of the reasons the old version is consuming too many resources. It just doesn’t work to fetching round data on every page.

Keep suggestions coming, please. The enter-a-tournament-id search shortcut is something I was always a bit iffy on because it makes it impossible to search for an actual number, but maybe that doesn’t matter.

In case you haven’t seen it, this week I bought back vanity URLs (now called custom links) to help with find-ability:

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Excellent. Thanks for taking the time to implement this.

You’re addressing this to the wrong person, I did tell every one of those people to contact you about it, and I am telling you right now about their issues in case they didn’t.

Good, then that’s something I can tell people who ask me about it (which they will, because there’s people who assume I can magically influence how Matchplay works, because of Strict Swiss).

What if I don’t know the exact name of the tournament?

I think multiple options to search for a tournament would be nice. Like I said before, simply a button that says “tournaments near me” would be fantastic in more ways than one.

i really like the Vanity URL being back, very nice to have.

is it possible to just have a separate search bar for the tournament ID #?

you can do a player search if you know a player or organizer of the tournament you’re looking for. in terms of getting back to that tournament, you can bookmark it like any old website

Since you asked why we keep using the old MP for things, here’s two things I can’t figure out how to do in the Next.Matchplay, and so I’m using both versions every league night still.

First, in order for everyone to see their groups, I bring up the “broadcast view” screen below which has an easy to read list for people to look at, that just shows the groups for the night, and nothing else. I put this up as soon as I verify our generated groups are ok, then once everyone has found their group, we switch over to the Big Screen View on Next. I’ve not found a suitable way to do this on Next since Big Screen View shows all the games generated for all the groups and as follows, can’t fit all the groups into one screen everyone can easily read.

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Second, I couldn’t figure out how to clone a series on Next last time I set up league. So I used the old version to build the new season.

Agreed! Thanks Andreas, our players also much prefer this format for viewing standings so having both ways available is great.

I would love it if the tournaments tab defaulted to either in progress or at least tournaments near the current date.

When I open it right now the first page is all tournaments 5+ months in the future.

Is the a specific text for how tie breaks (Strength of Opponents) works for formats like Max Match Play? Like how it’s calculated, etc.

I couldn’t find anything on it in the MP handbook (which I know is out of date).

If there’s an official post by Andreas here/somewhere please link it so I can save the link and send it to ppl when they fail to qualify for finals due to tiebreaks.

I’ll tack onto this - old Matchplay only shows events a week into the future, whereas nextgen shows everything, which shows events way too far out imo. Right now, the first page of all tournaments in nextgen shows events from 12/26/23 to 8/29/23, so browsing through all and looking for a given event doesn’t really work (which I didn’t mind doing before, especially in coordination with find on page or cmd+f on desktop). I’d enjoy seeing that weeklong restriction in nextgen, or at least a filter/button to bring to you a week out, or a tournaments happening today type of thing.

I often want to see tournaments I’m not playing in, just to follow along and see how folks are doing, and this is the one place where nextgen is not as easy as the older version for me.

As @chuckwurt said, tournaments near me would also be an awesome feature.

For Max Matchplay, when the tournament is running, in the standings it shows 3 numbers next to each player:

Total Points

Median-Buchholz: The sum of all opponent’s points. Highest and lowest value removed. Two highest/lowest removed when over 9 rounds.

Solkoff: Sum of all points from opponents. No values removed.

The Big Screen View highlights the TD in the standings and the TD’s game.

And it doesn’t show the results of the current round. I heard this is a “feature” of the new version, but many players don’t use a phone, they look at the big screen to see what game they are in and to check the results. Oftentimes players catch result errors on the big screen. At least have an option to display the results of the current round.

There appears to be an issue with using the “Keep 4 Best Results” setting for a Series.

It appears to be tallying and displaying the proper points for everyone but is still sorting/determining players position in the standings based on whatever their Total Points would be.

Edit: I just went to test what happens with other numbers of “best results kept” and it doesn’t seem to be as simple as Total Points determining the order.

One of the complaints i have gotten about the new software from some of the members from my league that help me score keep was, when entering match results, with the dots and the autofill feature. They find it much easier to make a mistake then the old software especially with the autofill. We do like how you implemented touching the names which definitely helps. We use a tablet for a lot of our events and find with the new software more mistakes are made when entering results. for example accidentally touching one of the dots then autofilling and not noticing. Maybe this is being nitpicky and i am not sure if anyone else agrees or not, but i thought i would bring it up

one other member mentioned they liked in the old software how easy it was to get the pin-tips. i did eventually find it for him, but he liked in the original UI when you have the name of the game, the pintips link is right there beside it

Some other members mentioned they just prefer the UI in the old software compared to the new

We did a round robin the other day for a split flipper tournament. it generated all the rounds and arenas for the whole tournament right away. so some people found it very difficult to find there matches and were doing a lot of scrolling to find where they were playing. is it possible to only show one round like a matchplay and the tournament director can choose to start the next round or not. and also i had a couple games go down during the tournament and since it generated all the rounds and arenas, i had to go to every round and find the game that was down and change arenas. is there a way if you deactivate a arena, you can refresh the round robin and it changes the game for any round with a deactivated arena

The best way to accomplish what you’re looking for is to use the Max Match Play/Roundless Round Robin tournament setting, set total games played to one less than the total number of Split Flipper Teams and then play out all of those games before creating your next round of games.

Open the big screen view in an incognito window if you don’t like the highlighting

Please share links to your series. Otherwise it’s very difficult to fix.

https://next.matchplay.events/series/2408

Found the issue! Should be better now!

Minor bug report: In a max match play tournament, I added a new machine to the arena list and then clicked the Create games button. Players who used the on-page refresh button to see their new matches on their phones saw their match listed with no machine name.

They were able to fix this by using the browser’s refresh button.

It’s probably not worth fixing but I figured I’d post it here in case anyone else comes across it and isn’t sure what to do.

Just wanted to give you a massive thumbs up. Been the TD of a tournament this weekend and having the preferred arena option for the streaming has made the entire thing so much better.

And having Matchplay with its amazing software and features makes my life as TD so much easier!

As always a pain to praise a Dane ( ) but none of us could hold our tournaments without you <3

It is worth fixing, but I haven’t decided on a strategy yet! The new MP transfers much less data around (for performance reasons) compared to the old MP. One consequence is that it’s currently not going to fetch player data (and arena data). I need to decide on the optimal strategy for doing so. I’ll get there!

@Odi I know it’s hard. As of a few years ago I am a dual-citizen of both the United States and Denmark. So you can think of me as an American when you want to give me a compliment and as a Dane when something isn’t working!

Are the “stats” (with the cool graph) not ported over to Next yet? Or could I just not figure out how to navigate it on desktop

I haven’t moved that chart over yet, but you’re not the only one to ask so I’ll get it ported soon

Profile photos and banners now available! Head over to your account settings to upload your mug to Match Play. There are three images to upload:

1. A profile photo. Available to all.
2. A large profile banner. Premium subscription required.
3. A “tournament image”. This will show up at the top of your tournaments and series. It’s one photos that will show up on all your tournaments. Use it if you run tournaments under a specific “brand”. Premium subscription required.

Thank you so much this works awesome! My additional request would be a way to add tie breakers based on people’s next best, for example I do best 2 results, however if people are tied for best 2 then their 3rd best would be the tie breaker, if that tied then 4th, etc.

This is still certainly good enough though, since I have the tie breaker rules written out players will be able to look at the results and know who’s ahead on tiebreakers even though the software says tied.

Edit: Oh one more thing I do and would be interested in as a feature is having some people marked as B division eligible and other people not, that way the series can cut to finals for both A division and B division.

@haugstrup Thanks again for MP software, and the new Max MP format option!

I’m curious… now that there have been quite a # of events that have used Max MP, and many TD’s have posted questions and feedback here regarding the format, is there any compilation of a few bullet points of recommendations/tips on how best to run Max MP tourneys? And/or key pitfalls to avoid?
(besides what’s already captured in Dropbox Paper document on Max MP)

This month Max MP officially surpassed Flip Frenzies in popularity!

Two bullets:

• If you’re not playing a true round robin, wait a bit to mash the “create matches” button. I’ve heard folks typically wait until they have 8-10 people waiting
• If you’re not playing a true round robin, keep an eye on whether one or more players are “falling behind”. If someone does start to fall behind, wait to create new matches until that player is waiting so they are immediately assigned a new match. If you can get them caught up before the very end that’s best

This is good timing because I just made updates to Max MP to address the three most common pieces of feedback I’ve received.

#1: Big screen view update interval
The big screen view will update every 15 seconds instead of every 60 seconds for Max MP tournaments.

#2: Limit number of matches created
When you create matches you can now limit the number of matches created. This is useful if you have a player falling behind and you want to hold back players who have played a lot of games quickly. By limiting the number of matches created you can create matches only for the players who are falling behind while leaving the rest of the field waiting.

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#3: Better overview of players
The “players waiting” section is rebranded as a list of all players. The list makes it loud and clear how many games each player has played. The list includes all players (both waiting and playing players), but you can still see how many players are waiting at a glance. Should make it easier to identify players who are falling behind.

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Would it work out to automate the “wait to create matches” stuff? Like if you could set it to automatically create your matches when X number of people are not currently playing. It could have an on/off button for if something comes up like a player falling behind or something like that.

Another suggestion would be to include something on the Big Screen view to show who is (or isn’t) currently assigned a match. Something like the full list of players in the “Waiting Room” as a separate area but even something much simpler like those pulsing circles next to a players name in the standings to show they are in an active game. That way, if Im wondering if Ive been assigned a game, I can look at my name on the standings instead of searching through all of the active games.

Generally speaking, no, automating the “create matches” action is not possible.

hmm. fair enough.

I’ve got a few issues and suggestions with the Max Matchplay format.

I’ve got a few trusted friends to help with scorekeeping and to keep the format flowing. When I briefed them I’m sure they were able to create matches on their phones. Now the button has gone.
This was really useful as our TD often plays and with this format moving so fast it’s likely for the waiting room to fill until the TD is back to hit “Create games”. So I liked having a few Scorekeepers who would regularly check the page on their phones and hit “‘Create games’” if active games drops below an advised amount.

Did I imagine the scorekeepers being able to create games? If so it would be a really useful addition.

The other solution is advising them to do it via the computer, but I worry that other players would see this (often players submit their results via the pc) and end up taking it upon themselves to click “Create games”, then you have the potential of someone ticking the safety release valve and screwing up the round robin. I know it’s unlikely but it only takes one impatient player who doesn’t understand.
Could it be possible to add the option to disable or enable the safety valve, like how you can change number of games and how tiebreaking works. It would be good to have it removed as an option when you create games as it’s not needed if doing a round robin and can eliminate the chances of someone clicking it if you’re allowing others to create new games.

A feature suggestion I think would be useful is a “pause player” button. Usually in a FF I’d use deactivate player but that won’t work in Max Matchplay.
As the format is so fast paced it would be good if a player or TD could be marked as away/paused if they need a toilet break, getting a drink or the TD who’s playing has to go deal a ruling.
It would solve the issue of a player waiting for their opponent when really they could (if available) play someone else.

The Max Matchplay format relies on players constantly refreshing, or waiting for the big screen to refresh then looking for their name. If it could announce, or jump to the newest matches once a player submits a score it would be useful.
Likewise on big screen, if the new matches could be on a top row with a header so people are drawn to them it might also help?

I also agree on the request for “recent results” in big screen.

26 posts were split to a new topic: Max Match Play discussion

Is there a guide anywhere on how to use MatchPlay to run Best Game style qualifying events? I seem to be able to setup it up ok, but I’m not sure how the player queues and scores are managed. I’ve turned on “Virtual Queues”, and I’ve figured out that by clicking the player I can add them to a queue for a game. But after that, I’m at a loss. It also seems that I can not add myself (tournament organizer) to a queue for a game and not sure if that is a bug or as intended.

@haugstrup odds of making it possible to change the number of strikes for the event mid tournament if no one has reached the max strikes yet? We just had a 4 strikes event start as 3 strikes and we played two rounds before noticing. Didn’t take long to start a new one, but would be nice to have this option.

Thanks!

Yes, would also like to be able to change the scoring when a round starts. Sometimes I mess up and use IFPA 7,5,3,1 for playoffs when I wanted 4,2,1,0 and have to redo the entire playoffs and sucks when you got 16 or 24 players in it…

i know Andreas is enjoying some Hiking, i am sure to take him away from all those requests

I was curious about one thing, when we run our last event, we did matchplay qualifier into a group knockout finals. With next Matchplay it did not let me select group knock out as a final type when doing the “create finals” so i had to create a separated event and copy past 20 people into it. Was this never an option even with the old matchplay? I thought it was possible but maybe i dreamt it?

Was the option to enter game scores intentionally removed from next?

Click on view details then enter game scores.

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If you have a venue with multiple rooms, where none cou handle the entire player base, how do you ensure a few arenas are drawn from each room?

I’ve tried Arena banks, and that always gives the groups the first game in that bank and never any of the other arena’s.

I thought with Arena banks it would pick one from each bank, in a balanced manner.

I also tried categories and that didn’t help either.

If you’ve got 44 players and 5 banks of 7-10 machines all in small rooms, what can you do?
There’s a chance most of the players will be drawn in one small room which is something we’d like to avoid.

You will want to assign games to categories (not banks) using the generic category labels (A, B, C, D, etc). Then put something like 2-3 pins from each room into category A, do the same for category B, etc. when you start a round, tell it to draw rooms from one of your categories. This should spread the draw through multiple rooms and avoid the random draw of 5 pins in the same room. This method might also necessitate that you have some pins duplicated so you can fill up each category with enough pins. It’ll take some playing around with, but definitely doable.

@chuckwurt I have to think through that it won’t get your into unexpected trouble, but I think I can let you change the number of strikes after the tournament started.

@diehardpinball Changing the points system after the tournament has started is far more messy since the results of matches have to be rewritten safely. It would be nice to do but is much more involved than changing the number of strikes.

@hisokajp I was indeed enjoying some time away from my computer, but here I am again… typing.

Pick any random format for your finals. Once the finals tournament is created you can edit iut like any other tournament. Edit it to change it to a group knockout. The “create playoffs” form lists the most popular formats for playoffs but you can always edit the tournament and make it whatever you want.

that’s what i thought but strangely i wasn’t able to pick another format even after somehow? I even try with NEXT and old Matchplay

Make sure you’re trying this before you hit start tournament.

must have been it, did a test tournament and it worked fine this time. let me select custom number of players into finals, went with dummy format then was able to change to group knockout before starting finals

If you find yourself in the situation with a started finals that you need to change in a major way you can always mark the finals as a test tournament, then delete it, then go back to the qualifying tournament and create playoffs again.

When displaying the in progress round you can tap/click Mine, Completed or In Progress to only show those, but you can never go back to showing all (no option for it).

And if you are only showing In Progress games and enter results all the options go away so there is no way to choose show Completed games. You can delete the results of a game if there was an error if you go to a player’s matches and select the game that way.

Click the selected option to reset. For example, if you’ve clicked “Mine” to show only your matches, click “Mine” a second time to reset your selection and show all matches

Ok, that works if there are still games in progress, but if I am down to one game and only showing in progress games, then after I enter that final game’s results it isn’t showing any games anymore (like it should because none are in progress) and the Mine/Completed/In Progress options disappear, so there is nothing to tap/click anymore!

And even if I start the next round and select from the dropdown to show the previous round it doesn’t show the games anymore.

Aha! I will fix!

Okay, should be better now

This just about works! It’s a little janky as one room has only 4 pins in use compared to another with 15+ I wasn’t keen on the duplicating workaround as Matchplay won’t see it as the same game and players might get put on the same games .
But the results are good enough!

It would be good if there was an option for arena banks where the software will pick a different game from each bank in a balanced manner.

I had tried arena banks at home as we have pins in 3 different rooms, hoping it meant we could have a Matchplay comp without 8 people being crammed around two games in one room but arena banks only picks the first game in that bank rather than a random/balanced one.
I understand that’s because it’s intended to be for when a group plays a few matches together in a round but it would be nice to have more flexibility, especially if you have a smaller venue and want to manage space easily.

Duplicating games will not result in players being put on the same games because all the duplicates are in separate categories. You’re only drawing from one category each round.

This is what the “category banks” option does. Beware: It will assign the same arena multiple times if a category doesn’t have enough arenas to cover all groups.

PinTips in Match Play
PinTips in Match Play! Click any arena name when playing a tournament to view the PinTips (short playing tips) for that pinball machine. You can also vote for the best tips, add more tips and flag inaccurate tips directly from Match Play. And finally there’s a new PinTips page where you can search for any pinball machine and view tips.

I hope this will bring a fresh round of activity to PinTips. Especially newer machines don’t have many tips and I hope that having the tips more easily accessible will lead to people sharing more tips for machines that are lacking them.

The old PinTips.net website still exists, but is generally quite flaky. I recommend using Match Play for your PinTips needs. You can now do the same things in Match Play that you could on the PinTips website.

Exactly what does the blue check mark indicate next to player names? I thought it may have been having their IFPA number linked to their name, but that doesn’t seem to be the whole answer. I manually added a bunch of IFPA numbers for the player list on this event and most popped up with the blue check, but a few didn’t. Nothing critical, just a curiosity.

https://next.matchplay.events/tournaments/101082/players

It indicates that the player has been claimed by someone with a Match Play user account

I am having a Foo Launch party tomorrow. I wanted to make it so the highest score recorded on Foo during the tournament got a cash prize. I am clear on how to get the game scores submitted for each game of Foo, but will the stats page show me that information as the tournament goes on? Or will I have to go back to each round to see what the scores on Foo were and keep track separately?

This is also a feature I hope to use at a future tournament where all scores are kept for one tournament, then those scores are used to determine pingolf targets for the next event.

thanks!

I just recently did a best game format on MP for my FF launch party and I had a very difficult time figuring out how to submit scores properly on the new next system. In fact I went into the old system and ran it out of there as I was confused on how to run it in the new system. It might just be a training thing but the old system you entered scores in a scorekeeper module, I also had two windows open so I could add players, refresh the scorekeeper module then add them into the queue so they could play I could not quite handle on how to do that in next. I will do some more testing next time I have one as I will need to learn the new next best game format in match play. One thing I did notice is that the refresh rates are 60 seconds on the Big Screen look which seems to be a default on all the tournaments it would be nice to make a global 15 seconds on them all like was done for Max Match Play. Even in my normal league on group match play I find the 60 second refresh is too long.

Is there any way to adjust for a wrong entry in an elimination bracket? The round is already closed. Link: Match Play Events

As a larger question, I don’t understand the Close Round feature of matchplay. Is it best practice to just leave all rounds open until the tournament ends so you can alter results as needed? Does it mess up swiss pairings if you leave them open?

This… Unless I really don’t remember, the game scores are only shown on each individual game

I will take any feedback you have. The biggest difference between old and new is that the new system only has one set of screens. Players, scorekeepers, TDs all go to the same place to view results and enter scores. That’s the one thing that won’t change. I was backed into a corner in the old system where any change I wanted to make I had to make three times (for the TD view, the scorekeeper view and the player view). It made it impossible for me to add features or change behaviors because everything took three times as long.

If you’ve closed the round, no. Only option at that point is to create a new tournament and delete this one. Clicking the “close round” button is you saying “I’ve double-checked these results and am happy”

You can do as you wish. Some tournament formats require you to close a round before the next one can be started. Swiss tournaments and knockout tournaments are two popular examples of tournaments where you must close one round before starting the next because the player pairings or player availability in one round is affected by the results of previous rounds.

No worries. Ram some test tournaments and I see this is the only way to call up the scores. Shouldn’t be too bad since we only care about the best score. We will just call out the current high score and just have folks tell me when they beat it.

I used Next Matchplay for our ECC best games tourney, best 2 scores per machines counting and it worked well. It does take a few more clicks around the UI compare to the dedicated DTM scorekeeper interface for those used to that but once you get the logic down it worked great.

Okay it is a training issue then, I will mess around with it in test and see if I can make it work, I only use best game for launch parties so no big deal…

Quick manual route: put a clipboard & scoresheet and and make everyone write down their scores OR only make them write down their score if it’s better than the best (like they do at golf tournaments for closest-to-the-hole on par 3s).

Digital route that would be harder to hack together but the scores are available in the original MatchPlay API, and I use that for a hacked PHP page tailored very specifically for our best game league that actually uses 4-player MatchPlay for group pairings.

I tried to see if I could get something working quickly but I don’t think I can do it before the start of your event since my original code only assumes a single 4-game round.

Bottom line is that it is available in the JSON call here: Match Play API Documentation

Are we missing the obvious? Stern Insider leaderboards are setup to do this exactly. Make everyone create an insider account if they haven’t already. I checked the leaderboard for the Foo Fighters launch party at Pinball Garage (guessing that’s where you are) and so far the high score today is Spikeloo at 125M or so. Of course… no insider account, no recorded score.

Correct. We did it in matchplay. There were a handful of people that don’t even have matchplay accounts let alone an insider account. Baby steps.

@haugstrup I’ve noticed that with a Series, if you do “X Worst Results Dropped” for standings, the API includes a “points_adj” field and player “position” reflects the adjusted points total but if you do “X Best Results Kept,” the API data is the same as if you did “All Results Kept.” Is there any chance of getting this updated to be consistent with “Worst Results Dropped”?

point_adj leads me to believe you’re hitting the legacy APIs. You should switch to the new APIs. Documentation here: Match Play API Documentation

The old APIs will never be updated when new features are introduced (and may in fact start producing nonsensical data). I will remove the old APIs when I take the old MP offline. Best to start your transition today!

Yep, that is 100% what is happening. Frankly I’m surprised I’ve made it this far! Thanks.

Has anyone had any issues with next not working on older iPads? The league has an iPad we use with the old version but doesn’t work worth the new version. I can get to the landing page but when I hit “Launch Match Play!” I get a white screen.

iOS 12.5.4. I ever tried download Chrome and get the same thing.

I think you’re out of luck

What @ectobar says is still true. The choice is between being able to maintain Match Play or keep support for very old software. I have to choose the former.

But see if your device can’t be updated to iOS 15 or iOS 16 and give that a go. It’s only if your iPad is from 2014 or older that you can’t update the software.

That’s fine. I was just asking to save myself a bunch of time trying to figure out if it was the iPad not behaving or just the fact that it was old.

@haugstrup I would be nice to receive a text message when I run out of message credits. I was receiving notifications and then they mysteriously stopped one round.

Maybe implement it by including x notification messages remaining when the player has 5 or fewer if that’s easier than sending a special text after the last one is used up.

The tournament search fails if you try to search for something with a slash in it like “Multiball Monday 2/27”. But it works if you replace the slash with %2F.

I’m doing a 64 player tournament today…after 9 rounds of qualifying, cut it down to 16 players. I’ll start a separate matchplay tourney for that.

Then I want to do 4 player groups, on a bank of 3 games, with 4-2-1-0 scoring on each game. Top two advance.

I want to keep doing slaughter pairing.

Not sure what my settings should be for this.

(And do I just manually deactivate the bottom two in each group, or is there a better way?)

It was a huge success! Thanks so much for the new format and letting some of us test it since last year. I was so excited but also anxious to run our real one.

25 players, so 300 games played total over 4.5hrs.
Originally we intended to have 10 active games (12 arenas in total) but went with using 9 and thought we could adjust after lunch if things were running too slowly but 9 was perfect. There was always 6 in waiting area and a few who had just finished their matches.
The feedback so far has been that it was more social than the flip frenzies which I thought would be the opposite!

We had 3 people who could create games and without them I think it would have slowed down. As soon as active games dropped below 9 they hit create games and sometimes it might drop to 8 or less but it was rare. As it was set as a round robin this didn’t create any issues at all.

The only tiny tiny tiny issue is the amount of ties you’re likely to get. We had two tiebreakers (top. 8 qualified for playoffs, semi, quarter and finals). But I can’t see how you can minimise ties with this format.

Matchplay
https://next.matchplay.events/tournaments/98554

Am I trailblazer for adding emojis to the game names? Added a bit of colour and humour😁

Photos if curious of the setup and vibe when you have a 25 player tournament in a small British semi detached house

[68 new items added to shared album] PinHaus Gone Flippin'- 29th April 2023

Once again thank you @haugstrup

Yes. Much easier way to do this. Run qualifying first. Then close that tournament. Then stay in that tournament and select create playoffs.

Then select group elimination bracket, the number of players you want (16). Then it will seed them based on qualifying. Then you can tell it to do slaughter in the options, but I think that’s default.

If the scoring is different than qualifying, make sure to change that in playoffs. It will be the same as qualifying to start.

Like @chuckwurt said, it should be group elimination bracket. If you create Finals
from Qualifying and take top 16, it should port those people over in seed order. I don’t think seeds are displayed on the big screens, but in my experience it behaves the same way as a NeverDrains final.

Just make sure that double check all settings (games, points) before starting. I messed up points for an even last month and had to clone and re-input like 8 matches to fix the problem.

Fixed now – sorry about that and thank you for reporting!

I have been using the following tiebreaker for our league. Most 1st and 2nd, then doing Strength of Schedule for the second tiebreaker. It is a bit painful to do but saves us from doing any one ball or full game tiebreakers, it can still have someone who is tied but is very rare. For the format we are using I don’t find using SOS fair right off the bat, is there any future enhancement to allow to you use two criteria’s for the tiebreaker, would make my life a little easier. Thanks for all you do.

Would it be easy/possible to add a filter to the tournament and series search page for Planned, In Progress, or Completed?

Thanks @coreyhulse and @chuckwurt. That’s exactly what I needed.

If there was a built in tiebreaker option for “most 1sts, most 2nds, then strength of schedule” I would also use it as my preferred option.

Text message notification requirements have changed. You must now have a premium subscription in order to setup text message notifications. Let me explain why this change was necessary:

In the old version of Match Play you could receive text message notifications but you’d have to pay for for each message by buying a number of text message credits. So when I got my bill from the mobile carriers I’d have money to pay it with.

But managing these credits was also a giant pain so when I built the new version of Match Play I knew wanted something simpler. I made text message notifications free and decided I’d pay for them out of pocket until I could figure out what to do.

Being free meant that a lot more people have been taking advantage of text messages. It’s no longer sustainable for me to pay for these out of pocket.

For example: In April 2023 Match Play sent ten times as many text messages as the year before! That’s just nuts! On top of that mobile carrier fees have increased and will be increasing again on June 1. My monthly bills have gotten intense and I need to make a change.

So starting right now you must have a premium subscription to setup text message notifications. The good part is that a premium subscription gives you additional features that even people who don’t organize tournaments can enjoy such as much more detailed user stats and the ability to upload a fancy banner image on user profiles.

IMO makes perfect sense, you should not be out of pocket (or having premium customers subsidize) if there are costs within a free subscription service. I know our players really like the text feature and happy to pay for it included within all the other features in the premium subscription service.

there are still cell phone plans that don’t have unlimited text and talk? i thought the only thing anyone paid for anymore was data?

you need to pay for Programmable Messaging you can’t just use an basic phone plan for that.

It would be quite the effort if text message notifications was really just me in my apartment typing out the texts on an iPhone! But yeah, there are both fixed fees to maintain a number for automated messaging and per-message costs to both the processing company (the entity I contact to send messages on MP’s behalf) and the mobile carriers.

Can’t you have notifications via chrome on your phone like lots of websites, -annoyingly - use? (I deny it any time a website tries to get those permissions, but for Matchplay it would be useful!

I agree it would be useful! It unfortunately also requires complicating the MP codebase significantly (so takes longer to build new features) as well as some buying access to some rather expensive infrastructure. The math hasn’t worked out so far but I do re-evaluate on a regular basis!

Thank you for adding, although I meant on the Search page… Perhaps it’s not tenable since it’s also for player/series searches? I am still having trouble searching for events and having to scroll through multiple pages past the planned ones.

New subscription plans and pricing update

I’m introducing three new subscription plans for Match Play. A “Pro” plan for tournament players, the “Premium” plan for tournament organizers and a “Patron” plan for folks who rely on Match Play and want to support the service even more generously.

I’m excited to offer a Pro plan for tournament players. This new plan will give players access to detailed stats about your tournament experiences, text message notifications and a few other features for those of you who want to support Match Play but aren’t organizing your own tournaments.

You’ll see that the Premium (and Patron) plan comes with a price increase. I’d like to talk about that a little bit. Match Play has had the same price since it launched way back in 2015! But Match Play is not the same app as it was back then. Today the Premium plan gives you access to 11 premium tournament formats (including the popular Max Match Play), as opposed to the three it launched with. Server costs have also increased substantially over the years (and MP is now handling over 20 times as many tournaments per month as it did in 2015). And I’m spending more time than ever building new features. The new prices reflect the level of support needed to keep Match Play sustainable for the future.

If you have an existing premium subscription, it will not renew. You’ll continue to have access to premium features for the period you have already paid for, but after that point you’ll have to re-subscribe to the new Premium plan. If you don’t want to wait or you want to give extra support to Match Play, you may subscribe early to the new plan.

You can read more on this page

And you can start a subscription to one of the new plans from your billing page

Thank you for supporting Match Play with your premium subscriptions over the years. I literally could not have done it without you.

I don’t like the naming of the plans
maybe better to have
basic for free
something like player plus? / pro player? (what you call pro)
Premium (what you have now)
Patron ok now for now but if start adding stuff that not in Premium then maybe adjust the names.

Now maybe if pro did have some of the premium tournament formats over fee then I can see the NAME fitting.

But for something that really just add’s stuff for that one user then the naming maybe should be something that says it’s just for the that user alone.

right now Free / Pro / Premium seems like other software and in that case the pro paid level should over all stuff.

Thank you for your feedback. The billing portal have pretty clear descriptions of what each plan includes. I need plan names that are pretty generic because I will be adding features to them over time.

@nudgey I hear you. I have a couple of week of work in front of me manually stopping renewals on the old premium subscriptions (see above) but after that my next area of focus of “how in the heck do I find my tournament”

I’m personally glad to see the price increase and a new tier for non TD players to pay for some features. You’ve totally revolutionized the tournament scene by making it easy to run so many types of events. I remember the days of messy spreadsheets and dry erase boards before Matchplay, so whatever it takes for you to keep doing this, I fully support it!

I think I’ve gotten with Andreas at least once a year asking how I can pay more. Haha

I recently played Group matchplay for the first time where new rounds were started before the last round was finished.

I want to organize a tournament for 30 players but only 5 pinball machines available. Does this work with Group matchplay similar to Max Matchplay?

Is there anything to consider so that everything works well?

I’m afraid I don’t understand your question.

2 Points:

1. I recently played Group matchplay for the first time when new rounds were started before the last round was finished. Is there anything to consider so that everything works well?

2. I would like to know if it is possible to play Group matchplay in a small location with 30 players but only 5 pinball machines. Is this possible?

it is possible but you will have groups without machine until the groups who has machines finished then you can draw the now available machine again. not very time efficient.

I think pairing choice is going to be the deciding factor on time efficiency.
If you’re using swiss, you’ll end up with a big log jam.
If you’re using balanced or random, it might work out well.