Max Match Play discussion

I love the MM Format!

There is one point I mentioned before.
I know, one of the idea of MM is like “endless round-robin” if you take off 1 player all his games are deleted. I understand well that it makes sense with small amount of rounds. I organized a MM-tournament with 36 rounds. One good player wanted to quit after playing around 30 rounds. (Maybe he saw he will not qualify for finals?). That means TGP will go down for everyone!
My suggestion would be that in a future version of MM the tournament director should have an option to decide if all games will be deleted or not, if a player decides to quit after at least 50% of the rounds played.
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 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.

What do people here think about this?

I think people shouldn’t be douchy and quit when they don’t have a chance of winning or leave early if they do IMO they shouldn’t count towards TGP as it just supports more of this behaviour. As a TD my job is to explain that this format is very inflexible and if you are going to attend these are the restrictions.

No one will admit that they don’t want to play any more because no chance for finals, but will find some excuse why they have to leave. You can’t force anyone to stay in the tournament. According to IFPA rules, at least 50% of the games must be played in order to be scored.
In Germany, we play Round Robin in average 12–16 rounds, If someone quits, his games must be deleted, because otherwise the others would have different numbers of games at the end.
In MM it is not necessary to delete the player, because all the others can still play the same number of games. And like Flip Frenzy you can easily play 36 Rounds during 1 Day.
Did anyone run already MM with 36 rounds or more?
This is just my opinion for future updates of MM.

Life events are outside the control of both TDs & players. It’s inevitable players will leave sometimes.

Best to have a plan for dealing with that whether it’s dropping all their games, pairing them with a placeholder for the rest of the event, or some other solution.

Ive been testing out Max Match Play for an upcoming tourney and figured if a player leaves early, I can just wait until they are assigned a match, change their opponent to a ghost player, change their arena to a ghost arena, increase the max matches by 1 and then never enter results for them. Then they will not be added to new matches and when everyone else has played all of their matches, I can close the tourney. Not sure if there are unseen issues that will come from that, but I don’t like the idea of taking an legit earned win away from a person.

It also takes away losses as well.

And you can’t just give players an free pass / free win and that may have TPG issues as well.

how about everyone pays a $100 deposit in addition to their tourney fee that they get back on completion of the event but they forfeit if they leave early?

In Germany not practical.
Why don’t let the tournament director deciding in a future MM version if all games will be deleted or not if someone decides to quit early? It only needs to be ensured that in this case, all remaining players have the same number of games at the end.

I don’t really see why an earned win would be a free pass. If you play a player and beat them, then you earned a win, if you lose you “earned” a loss. As for TGP, you’d still be playing the same number of games as everyone else.

If you were playing a strict round robin format, then things would be different but I’m just talking about playing Max Match Play where you won’t play everyone or will play some people multiple times.

free pass when the gone player trun comes up and you don’t remove them.

That’s actually not an issue though. And it’s kind of the fundamental function of my workaround. When their next match comes up, the Gone Player will be intentionally paired with a “Ghost (fake) Player” and not a real competitor so as to keep them (and the Ghost Player) out of the player pool in subsequent rounds. The first time Gone Player is assigned a match, you can go in and change who they are playing (and their arena) so you switch Real Player to Ghost Player (Real Player returns to the waiting room). Gone Player remains locked in Absentee Jail for the remainder of the tournament.

The biggest issue I can currently see is that any wins against Gone Player will be less valuable when it comes to automatic tiebreaker stuff but I figure that is more acceptable (to me as the TD) than fully deleting game results.

The thing is, I don’t anticipate players leaving early since we are aiming for our Max Match Play to run like 3 or 3.5 hours. But I prefer to run test tourneys and over plan ahead of time so that I don’t have to come up with solutions mid-tourney while I’m trying to play scorekeeper and also compete.

@Shaub I like this workaround that you’ve proposed. It seems to me like it’s an improvement over what I had planned on doing. I had planned to just manually assign a different active player each time a pairing was made involving the departed player. That would get frustrating because it would need to be done every time Create Games is clicked after the player left. It would also be difficult to avoid creating a repeat pairing this way.

Your approach would be even easier to do if @haugstrup is interested in implementing a “Pause player” feature (suggested earlier). You could use this to leave the departed player indefinitely paused.

Your approach may hit problems if you end up with a number of rounds that’s more than a round robin. In that case, the Create Games button will refuse to get past the first round robin stage of pairings if anyone had not played against the departed player. You can use the Emergency Valve to get around this. I don’t believe that problem will come up if your tournament is shorter than a round robin.

Why is increasing the number of matches part of your strategy?

General question… why is Max Matchplay so popular if it has so many logistical issues? I haven’t played one yet and I’m not feeling motivated to try running one since I see so many complaints and cases of messing up the format with players leaving, etc.

Genuinely curious what the appeal is. Is it just high TGP in a short timeframe? What makes it preferred over old fashioned group matchplay?

It’s a head-to-head format that scales up well. Similar to other formats that use a waiting list or queue concept, you can accommodate more players with fewer machines. Though obviously it takes more time than it would take with more concurrent games running.

It does feel a lot like Flip Frenzy. Some people like that faster pace of pairings with head to head matches. But they also like WPPRs, so this seems to be a good compromise.

When doing an exact round robin (number of rounds = number of players minus one) it works better than the round robin implementation in Match Play Events. In particular, your event will take less time because you start games without waiting for a full round to finish. It also does a better job of displaying the matches that should currently be active. (In the actual round robin format implementation it shows all rounds at the beginning of the tournament, sorted last round to first round, which players find confusing.)

The problem of “someone could fall behind and run out of pairings” is the price you pay for the efficiencies gained by taking this “roundless” approach. It’s a problem, but with the recent UI changes I think it will be easy to avoid as long as the TD knows to look out for it.

In my opinion we will settle on good solutions for the “what if a player leaves” problem. That problem already comes up in other formats and is handled without substantial issues. The current problems stem from the particular approach that Andreas took in the Max Match Play implementation. If consensus is that a deactivated player should not have their past matches stricken from the record (and if Andreas is willing to accommodate that feature request), then I think that we can settle on good solutions for the “half game” problem that can arise from dropping a player mid-tournament.

I don’t think it’s particularly high TGP per hour.

I’ll also say, that I agree with your overall sentiment though. In my opinion it’s an OK format, but not great. It has some flaws that can be improved, but overall it’s not going to be as popular as group match play or knockout. I think it has the potential to be a little more popular that Flip Frenzy was in previous years.

I’m so engaged in these discussions because I like experimenting and problem solving (so I’m trying to help make the format better), and because I was already in a head to head round robin league so it’s kind of perfect for some complaints that group had about the previous round robin implementation.

Interesting point about the round robin thing, I never considered that but will definitely test it out.

As for increasing the Active Matches by 1, the reason is that the Gone Player will be in an “Active Match” taking up one of those spots and I want to keep the same number of real active matches going.

Its a new tourney format that was implemented in MatchPlay and people are just working out the logistics and potential issues that may arise when using it.

Thanks for clarifying. I thought you meant that you would change Duration, I had forgotten about the Max active games setting.

For those that have run Max MP with a constrained # of pins (more players playing than 2x the # of pins), by a fair margin… has anyone noticed an optimum % of empty pins before creating more matches?

If you have substantially more players than 2x the pins (e.g. 60 players for 15 pins), then I think you could start matches pretty frequently. My thought process here is that while the next selected arena might not be too random, the player pairings will feel very random with a big waiting list. I’d try out having at least 3 pins available so that there’s still some randomness in which machine the new pairings get. With a large number of players in the waiting list, I think it’s unlikely that someone who just finished their match will get repaired right away, so the chance of them getting a repeat game is lower.

If you are closer to 2:1 (e.g. 25 players for 10 pins) then I think you want to aim to have about half of the pins available before starting the next set of games. With fewer available pins you run the risk of a player repeatedly getting assigned to the same game. Obviously every time they’re in the waiting list their previous game is one of the available options so they’re more likely to get it.

Every time that I’ve gone into a tournament with a clear plan of when to start matches it always seems like the general chaos of TD’ing leads to me departing from that plan and waiting longer when I feel like I have to (for a player who is falling behind) or delaying because I got busy with a call or long ball or going faster than I had planned (because someone didn’t get paired the last time I clicked the button due to having already played the other waiting list players at the time and they’ve now been in the waiting list for 10 minutes and are getting antsy so I click the button again with only an arena or two available).

24 players to 18 pins (link)
This one hit the problem where a very good player got a few games behind and we intentionally held off on creating games so that they didn’t get stuck. If I had noticed it earlier it would have had a smaller impact.

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31 players to 12 pins (link)

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Is there an option in there to have Max MP auto-trigger “Create Games” when the # of empty available games = X?
(which you would then disable after you got further into the tourney, in case one player was falling behind)

Nope

@Snailman here’s one more view of that second tournament with 31 players and 12 pins.

We started out kicking off games any time there were 3 or 4 machines available. After about an hour and a half that creeped up to starting matches when there were 5 to 7 machines available. I was out of town for this tournament and had someone guest TDing for me, so I can’t provide much other context.

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This qualifying phase was 13.3% TGP per hour. The group match play tournaments and fair strikes tournaments that I run with the same players and machines gets 15% to 18% TGP per hour. A year ago I ran two flip frenzies on similar machines and with a somewhat less skilled player base for 20% to 24% TGP per hour (v5.7 rules).

Thanks so much for the feedback and charts!

I wouldn’t be using it without it being a round robin and I doubt everyone else would get that far ahead if someone pops to the toilet or has a smoking break.

The create games button would continue to work like it does when a player falls behind. I’ve done a few tests where I’ve put a new player in when everyone else has hit 10 games played, in a 25 game max Matchplay. The new player is able to catch up quite easily due to how it pairs people.

Just that it is the best head 2 head format at the moment. Fast, fair (since you can make repeat opponents less of a thing,) and fun. Just a perfect blend of old head2head matchplay and flip frenzy. The logistical issues are not as big as you think.

Just add time for 1 player to leave early. And if your normal participants are super casual players who get bored quickly (or super try hards who leave if they sniff a chance that they can’t make finals) then skip this format

I would say that this format and Amazing Race has made running tournaments a lot more fun.

(Moved the Max MP talk to a separate thread since it was getting a little involved)

Thanks again… question on how many “peak” Active Games at Start Time you had… you had 12 pins, and it was always peaking at 10 games, max. Was that intentional to not have all 12 pins active at the moment that new games are created?

Or was this an issue where 2 pins were deactivated for malfunctions, etc?

We didn’t limit the number of pins. We started with 10 arenas and quickly realized that the tournament would run better with more pins so we bumped that number up to 12 and started more games. I think what you were seeing was just a misleading chart. That original chart was saying that there were never more than 10 games already running when we clicked the create games button (in effect, aways creating at least 2 games to get the total number of active games back up to 12).

Here’s a new chart from that same tournament that does a better job of showing arena usage.

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Notice that we started new games really rapidly at first. We kicked off one or two games at a time as soon as the arenas became available because we started the tournament with 10 games at 12:08 with 20 players playing and 11 waiting. We added two more arenas as quickly as we could to get to a total of 24 players playing, but there were still 7 players who hadn’t even started their first game by 12:20. So we wanted to just start games as quickly as possible in the beginning. After that we shifted to starting games when there were 3 or 4 arenas available.

And just for fun, here’s one more that shows how much time each player spent playing vs waiting. (X axis is just a value for each of the 31 players.)

Most players spent between 55% to 70% of the time playing matches and the rest of their time waiting. We had 2 machines for every 5 players. If you’re more imbalanced than that, keep in mind that there will be more waiting time.

We have nine pins, and when we have three empty pins then a TD hits the button. Two empty pins is too few and results in more repeated arenas for an individual. I’ll also look around the room and if I see a game or two close to ending I’ll wait another 30-60 seconds before drawing since that will increase the number of players.

thank you @coreyhulse and @tommyv …
At the beginning of the tourney, I think I’ll Create Games as soon as two pins are available, for X number of times, where X = [# of players starting out the tourney in the Waiting Room] / 4.

And once we’ve Created Games X number of times, then I’ll transition to waiting until 3 pins are available, per Corey’s input.

Thanks again!

Apparently there’s an issue if you let players get too far behind in number of matches where they won’t be able to play their final matches as they’ve already played all their potential partners

I ran a Max Matchplay this week with no issues. I had 24 players. I started every time the queue hit 8 players - unless someone was starting to lag behind by a couple rounds, then I waited for them to finish their match before I started the next match. We got through 7 rounds in just under 2 hours, then had a final.

I only had 2 software gripes:
When players have finished their final match, they are added to the count for queued players, which is a little confusing.
While the “predictions” tab is a cool idea, I wish it was hidden from the players. I think it can motivate players that are far behind to quit (or at least emotionally quit).

If that happens you just manually assign a match. This format doesn’t guarantee you will have repeats but it does a good job. I’ve run it 2 times, once with no repeats and once the final match was a repeat.

Most of the discussion of max Matchplay is around picking a number of rounds. Has anyone tried it as a round robin in the real world yet?

We’ve got our max Matchplay coming up in two weeks. 26 players, set to 25 games played.
We’re used to running flip frenzies and can’t wait to finally try the new format for real. I’m a little anxious about the creating of new games and how much it will slow down towards the end when it has to wait for people to complete all the pairings.

We’re allocating 4-1/2hrs. 12 arenas and max of 10 in use at once, but will adjust if needed.
Hopefully it completes in the allotted time. With a flip frenzy we had 4hrs and some players hit 26 games played.

I can see there being a lot of ties by the end.

Used it for round robins (and double round robins) a few times. Super smooth and more efficient than using the normal way of playing round robin in rounds.

I’ve ran a few of these so far, and I don’t think you will hit your number in 4.5 hours. I also tried to gauge my time/games based off of previous flip frenzies and that did not work out for us. We used to run 1.5 hour flip frenzies and get in 15 games so I tried to run our Max Matchplay events for 13 games and that didn’t work. I had to change it on the fly to 12 games and it took us almost 2 hours to hit that number with 10 machines going.

The other key metric here is all of our games are set to NO ball saves and NO skill shot ball saves and 24 of the 30 players are very novice, which means game times were not long and players weren’t blowing up games. For example, the longest playing game was Last Action Hero (can’t disable ball saves) which was played 7 times for an average time of 8:20. Our next longest playing game was Deadpool Premium played 9 times for an average time of 7:43. We had 18 total arenas with 6 of them being classics.

On some games don’t do that or need to POST AN NOTE ON THE GAME.
Like iron maiden

Don’t you worry Dragon! My pre-tournament announcements cover that along with everything else. 95% of the time when I finish announcements and ask “Does anyone have any questions?”, no one has a question because that is how detailed my announcements are.

@DaveTheTrain I agree with @djreddog … mathematically, with 270 minutes, and 25 games to play, it means 10.8 minutes per game, but that’s assuming NO BREAKS and never any time in the Waiting Room.

With only using 10 games maximum, that means there will be times where you’ll have less than 10 games, so if you fluctuate between 8-10 games in use at any time, then an average of 9 games. Or 18 players actively playing, on average. 18/26 = 0.69… so I would take your 10.8 minutes per game, and multiply by 0.69, resulting in game times of 7.5 minutes per game. Those are short games! Hope you have no moderns.

I play in and co-host a league where each session is a 16-player round robin. Since it’s a league we don’t worry about ties in any single session, but I do expect that you’ll have a large number of ties. If you plan on cutting to a finals I’d definitely recommend having a plan for how you’ll break ties (even among 5+ players). We did run a max match play tournament with a finals once and it lead to a 6-way tie. Fortunately we had a Baywatch available. Here’s another idea for a situation where you expect a lot of tied players: you could tell players ahead of time to record their first score on a particular machine and use those scores as the tiebreaker; anyone who didn’t get assigned that game would play it at the end of qualifying if needed. Of course just running a 3-player then 2-player pair of tiebreaker games also works.

Using Max Match Play definitely runs faster than using a traditional round robin where everyone waits for the round to finish before starting their next game (and it has the potential to use fewer machines), but it will run slower than a flip frenzy.

The pairings definitely go slower towards the end. You can manage this a bit by spreading that waiting time throughout the evening by not letting any player get too far behind the rest of the group. You don’t need to do this with a round robin but I think it still makes for a more pleasant player experience.

We have a 24-player max match play round robin planned for 5/13. I’ll let you know how it goes! We plan to have 12 machines and use all 12. What’s the reasoning behind limiting arenas to max of 10 in use at once?

We do a Women’s Max Match Play 14 games in 2 hours, so it is plausible depending on how the machines are setup and the skill level of the players. I don’t think I would get it done in 2 hours with regular league players be more like 2.5 hours I would think with our setups. We at least have 2 sec ball save on Moderns but they are setup pretty difficult.

From the streams I’ve seen, that’s an understatement!
Also, well done! on those setups.

And they didn’t listen.

Our games are all 1995 and older.

Centaur, Zaccaria Locomotion, Zaccaria Space Shuttle, Genesis, Baywatch, Road Show, Fish Tales, Attack from Mars, World cup soccer, Junk Yard, Creech and Diner.

I’ve been experimenting with settings to try and make them not too easy, but I don’t like them to be unfairly hard. Most of our players are intermediate but get a handful of top 20 UK players. Annoyingly the ROM in my Junk yard seems buggy and no matter what I change ball saves remain on. Even when set to off! But on AFM the exact settings have different results. JY does have the soren ROM so maybe it’s got a bug, I’ll have to ask him.

I’ve done a few test Matchplay events when a friend came over and after 24 games, the avg was 6:30, with most games lasting between 3 to 8mins. With surprisingly Diner lasting over 10mins every time… I would not have predicted that. I guess I’ll remove post rubbers.

(Ignore the emojis, I’m a trendsetter )

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If it takes longer, it takes longer. It’s our first time trying this format and it’ll be a learning experience. As long as the players know I’m sure it’ll be okay.

We have a playoffs for the top 8. Usually our events start around 1030 and finals are fine by 1800 with a break for lunch at 1330-1415ish

Ours is on 29th of April so I’ll be along with the results before your event.
Reasoning for 10 active games is because I like to have a bit of space and two games available so it’s unlikely you’ll get out back on the same game straight away. I will keep an eye on it during the first session and alter it if needed.

has an basic ball save even when off like drain right away but if you hit just about anything it’s off when set to no ball save.

I suppose similar to the wpc-s games where you turn ball save off there’s no insert lamp flashing but you get the ball back if it drains quick?
I’ll set it to off and give it another test. I was hoping setting it to 4 seconds would do something but it didn’t seem to when compared to another Wpc95 game (afm)

number of ball saves is different from time and all games have some level of valid playfield.

Some games like Indianapolis 500 where ball save off does not trun it off but seems to make the time an little less and Scared Stiff does not do any thing.
as well games like Bram Stoker’s Dracula Do not trun off ball save or make it very small (buggy and multi ball save time is the same setting as main ball save).

Those who’ve run Max Match Play… what are the best practices for timely and effectively notifying Waiting Room players to check whether they’ve been assigned to a new match each time you Create Games? Specifically in loud environments with people in nearby different areas – we have the pins all in a line at a family entertainment center, and some people hang there while they watch a current match or chat with players who are in those matches, some that hang out in an adjacent “party room” that the FEC lets us use, and others that will be at the nearby bar and tables that are within sight of the games. And I’m assuming some others will go outside during some of their Waiting Room stints to have a smoke.

a PA system in the venue was super useful, even then, people wander off, go out for a smoke, it is hard to run with casuals in a mixed bar/arcade location and stay efficient for sure-

I’ve encouraged my players to signup for a MatchPlay account and I turn on (and pay for myself) text notifications. I haven’t specifically used this in Max Match Play, but have had decent success in regular matchplay tournaments. However, I will also admit that over half my player base still doesn’t seem motivated to sign up for a Matchplay account so YMMV.

Edit: I have been using old matchplay quite a bit and just realized I can’t find the checkbox to enable text notifications on the Next.Matchplay version. Maybe I’m missing it… @haugstrup ??

The above is one of the drawbacks of Max Matchplay. I’m finally running one tomorrow, set as a round robin.

Our issue is we have a small living room with the TV showing the big screen and no other screens. This works for flip frenzies as people know where they are in the queue. But our main space is outside.

With max Matchplay we’re going to put a TV outside to display the big screen also and hopefully people will get used to checking to see if they are in a match.

It’s that or they constantly refresh Matchplay on their phones.
We’re going to be creating new games every minute or less, so shouting or announcing wouldn’t really work, especially considering this is a house with the pins in different rooms.

I predict people getting to their matches will be the main cause of delays in this format. Fingers crossed people get used to it and help out by finding their opponent if they haven’t appeared!

This might be a good time to point out there’s discord notifications available in MP Next now as a beta. I tested it out earlier this week and it worked out, I think I’ll try it out at the next MMP event I attend/run.

My solution has been to announce the machines and player names for each game. But obviously that doesn’t scale up, or work in a loud environment, or work if players are going to wander away from the playing area. This is definitely a disadvantage from Flip Frenzy where the time in the queue was a little more consistent and predictable.

I think this is a good option too.

Having the matches on a TV at the tournament director table worked really well for the first Max Matchplay I ran. Will see how it goes in the next month when I run another. I ran it as a round robin and players seemed to understand it well and mostly had a few minutes between every other round or so, enough to lend time for any sort of break

If you have an account you can view PinTips directly in Match Play:

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@haugstrup you’re my hero

“Scorekeepers create matches
Yes”

Only noticed this as I set up our Matchplay for today! Perfect!

Thanks so much

I only added it last night. Half the TDs of the world thinks their tournaments will be ruined if scorekeepers can create matches, the other half thinks their tournaments can’t be run unless scorekeepers can creates matches. So now there’s a setting!

that’s actually so convenient. Thanks.

Put this in the other Matchplay thread by accident but it was supposed to be here…
Regarding our max Matchplay yesterday…

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

I’m happy to hear your tournament went well!

I think so. Emojis have been possible for a while (since I moved databases last year) but I haven’t advertised the possibility. Only a handful of people have found out on their own

Adding my initial recap of first Max Match Play format that we’ve run here in Austin…
Overall: great experience. Vast majority of players that gave me their feedback had positive things to say, and preferred it to our traditional Group Match Play format we’d been using (as many rounds as possible over 3 hours)

31 players. Max Match play format. Format worked really well. Didn’t get any more TGP than we had been getting from standard 4P round-based group match play qualifying. But the consensus was that it “felt” like you were playing more pinball and less waiting for the one long-playing 4P match to finish.

On all moderns. Even with them set up difficult, it took full 3 hours to get 12 H2H games in. No initial ball saves. Tight tilts at lowest denounce. Sensitive slings all around. Outlane post rubbers removed. MB ball savers cut in half.

Started with 13 pins, and lost Champ Pub during round 1. Then quickly lost CV. And lost IJ WMS very late in the event, so we ran with 11 for most of the evening. Initially, we would Create Games as soon as we got down to 2 pins available, though many times we had 3 pins available by the time we clicked it. Halfway through the event, we moved to waiting until we had 3 pins available before Creating Games. We had most players all within one game of each other in terms of games played.

When we got down to having some players that started having all 12 games played, and noted that there were a handful of players still playing their 11th game, then we delayed Creating Games until the last two players playing their 11th game had finished, so we had a pool of 6 players to assign the final 3 matches to.

We had ZERO repeat opponents! Everyone had a handful of “2” repeat games, and only one player that had a “3” repeat game. Well done, @haugstrup !!

Scorekeepers being able to Create Games… I selected “Yes” but none of the Scorekeepers had an option to Create Games from their phone. So they just went to my laptop to Create Games, and that worked fine. @haugstrup I’m not sure why my Scorekeepers that were playing couldn’t create games. Perhaps because we created the tourney prior to you making the change in MP? The option presented itself on the tourney organization/admin screen, and we selected it, and had the Scorekeepers set up. What do we need to differently to enable it?

https://next.matchplay.events/tournaments/99716/

Could be that your scorekeepers needed a reload of the tournament config. After you open a tournament the config isn’t updated unless you switch away from the tournament (like going to the dashboard and back again or you reload the browser).

Still deciding on the best strategy for refreshing the tournament config. I’ll get there eventually

Finding myself not a fan of the format. It doesn’t eliminate the waits, it backlogs them into the final rounds when you are waiting around for the people with less games played to finish their game to create new matches to avoid sticking people with no one to play. Also not a huge fan of having first place be determined by software tiebreakers. To be fair I haven’t played in one that uses MMP as a qualifying format with a separate finals, that at least would avoid that situation.

I think this is actually not a problem, because disabling ball save does not eliminate the added ball save time for hitting a skill shot, so shooting the left outlane SS should still result in a ball save.

if skill shot ball save is set to off then no
if secret skill shots off then no

a lot of TDs ALSO eliminate skill shot ball saves on games like godzilla.

maiden needs a note when secret skill shot is disabled though. cause if ball save and secret skill shot are disabled and the player doesn’t know they can screw themselves.

I appreciate the conversation on how to handle players leaving early. Right now my event description says if you leave early you will be removed, as things currently are set up to handle. If there was a “pause player” option or something that would take them out of future rounds but not delete prior results that would be ideal. I have run 5-6 of these and I like them as do my players, so certainly plan to keep them going.

Last weekend we run a max matchplay 27 Player 26 Rounds Round Robin

All went smoothly, Just at the End we were shocked as for 3 players showed 27 rounds and rest 26 rounds.
But we recalculated amount of games and all had 26 rounds, so it was only a display bug, but did not matter.
https://next.matchplay.events/tournaments/111928/standings

As in past on MM we had always to take care that in the end the difference between the lowest plaid rounds and highest played rounds is small to avoid that the same players have to play against each other again in the last rounds.

This weekend we will have another round-robin

• If we use max matchplay for round-robin, we do not need to care when we create new games, right?

• I remember there was a discussion, that in future could be possible to pause a player for example he wants to eat something. Is this still a plan in future?

• I asked already if in future it could be possible that tournament director can decide if a player leaves the tournament, all games will be deleted or not. IFPA rules mark that if someone plays 50% of total games, he will be counted. We’ve already played 34 rounds, and one player left the tournament because he saw that they wouldn’t make it to the finals. So please let decide tournament director if player will be deleted or not. If not, of course, the rest of the players need the same amount of games in the end.

but then you have other issues like
the missing player spot should not give lot’s of free wins to other players maybe 1-2 may have to have to happen but say 50-10% of the rounds have an free win to an player?

what if you have an add an dummy player to just play the gone player does that dummy player have to be ifpa logged and pay the $1 fee?

also the delete choice is bad as that removes both win’s an losses from other players and that may have IFPA issues.

Now you may say that with an delete it’s like that player did not play at all and that may an work around for the 50% in rule.

still need to even out number of games played for all players.

Correct, if you have the number of games set for a true round robin (or a double round robin) then you can hit the “create matches” button as often as you’d like without risking repeat opponents.

I haven’t thought about pausing a player. I’ve made a note to consider it in the future. Currently leaning towards “no” because it can really wreck a tournament if used wrong.

No, one of primary rule in Max Matchplay is, that every player play same amount of rounds by ending the tournament.
So if one player left the tournament, other players should still have in the end the same amount of games plaid.
If there are more total rounds than “player-1” anyway should not be a problem, if there are fewer players than rounds also it is no problem as some player will have same opponent 2 times anyway.
If the tournament is a round-robin, in this case the tournament director should delete all result for player who left the tournament.

We played an MM tournament yesterday.
Although it was IFPA certified, it was rather a tournament with many beginners, since only Friday evening from 7 pm. 35 players, 12 rounds before the finals.
2 players (1 couple) had to give up shortly before the end because of an emergency call. Some had played against them but because of that, suddenly some players played 1–2 games less than others, so that the differences in already played rounds became bigger, the playing time of the whole tournament had increased because of that and at the end even double pairings were created. (Normally this never happens in my MM-tournaments if no player quits)

In our pinball club, we play our league 1 time a month. As it is more for fun, here it also happens that players do not stay until the end. We used MM. But for this reason since a while we play like before “Head to Head matchplay”.

I had asked before. Is it planned for the future that the tournament director decides whether all games of eliminated players are deleted or not? Exception of course Round Robin. In the end, MM is only about the fact that everyone has played the same number of games.

What happens if one player ends up with less games than everyone else? For example, everyone has 10 games and one player has 8 games and the end?

I believe what happened is near the end 3 players had 9 games and 1 player had 7 games. The TD created a game with 2 of the 9-game players paired together. Then the 7-game player was paired with the remaining 9-game player. So, in the end that player only had 8 games and no one to pair with unless they could play themself!

So, how does this affect the IFPA submission and TGP? Counts as 8 TGP since one player only had 8 games? I kind of screwed the one player who only got 8 games in the standings.

How did it work out with the IFPA submission? In my opinion this should be treated as 10 meaningful games played since that is what the vast majority of players completed.

In my mind it’s similar to what would happen if you were using a group match play format and one of the players needed to leave a 10-round tournament two rounds early. They would be included in the results with the points they earned in the 8 rounds they played. They’re not dropped from the results because they played in at least 50% of the qualifying requirements.

If that player is ok with missing out on the opportunity to play those two matches, then I think it’s fine to let the results stand as they were. If they want to play those two games I’d have them play matches vs the two players closest to them in the standings. The opponents have an incentive to try to win to preserve their spot in the standings, even though they could not earn any additional points. If the person who was two matches short gets more wins in these extra games then use Adjust Points to increase their final standings points. It’s not a great solution but it’s something.

For the situation where someone leaves near the end, I let their results stand, and the couple matches that they got assigned after they left, they forfeited that match. In my thinking, it was better to negatively impact the 1 or 2 matches where their future opponent was granted an instant win, than the negative effect of removing from existence the 10-11 matches already played.

Also better for tournament time/schedule.

Also, knowing that this will happen, it encourages people to stick around, knowing that they can’t bail and not have their results counted.

No one is really answering my question about what the TGP should be. If one player ends up with less games (8) than everyone else, and that player did not leave, they just ran out of opponents because everyone else already played 10 games.

IFPA says for Max Matchplay: The number of matches played by all players will be the number of meaningful games counted towards TGP.

In this case should it be TGP of 10 or 8?

If you dialed everyone else back, and only counted all players’ first 8 games, then it should be 8 MGP - and all but one pissed off player.

If you decided “that’s pinball” for the player who only played 8 games, and they received 0’s for their last two unplayed games, then 10 MGP – and one pissed off player.

You’re suggesting that’s it’s the TD’s choice. And you can’t really only count each player’s first 8 games because some of those games involved the player with only 8 games, so that would wupe out some of there games.

I wasn’t the TD and I didn’t even play in the tournament, but it counted as 40% on IFPA (10 TGP).

I don’t think it’s a legal decision to give players points because other players left the tournament
.
I have asked several times if in the future it is planned that the tournament director decides if eliminated players will be banned and not the software. The only important thing is, that all left players will have same amount of played games in the end.

I never received an answer to my question.

Since in my tournaments, which are contested often more than 30 rounds, both beginners and experienced players are present, I will have play in the future Swiss System instead of MM as it happens, that player leaves before End of tournament

This isn’t an issue in Flip Frenzy.

FF > MMP

Just as “legal” as taking away points legitimately earned by other players, and giving other players a 2nd chance to rewrite the history of their zeroes.

@Snailman
unfortunately, my English is not perfect.
Did I understand it correctly? If someone drops out early and misses 3 games, for example, then the 3 opponents who are still drawn against him get one point as a gift?

No problem! I share in your concern over how to handle the situation when someone drops early from MMP format.

I’ve applied the same type of logic that is standard practice in Herb (Unlimited Best Game) qualifying, where if a pin is operational for players to make entries (play games) for over half the time of qualifying, then the results from the pin stand. If the pin is not operational for 1/2 the time, or looks like it’s not fixable, then those entries and qualifying points on the Disabled Pin are removed from qualifying consideration, and the affected players get their spent entries back.

So if a player drops from MMP before 1/2 the duration of the tourney, then I would remove them from the tourney, and delete any match results of that player.

If a player drops from MMP after the 1/2-way point of the tourney, then I would keep their results.

In the instance I encountered, a player dropped with either 1 or 2 matches (of 12 total) remaining due to feeling ill. So I kept them in the tourney, and their 11th/12th match, those two opponents received a “bye” of sorts, with a free win. Very similar to how some players receive byes during a H2H Strikes format, whenever there is an odd number of players remaining. I think that this solution of artificially affecting two players’ results is a less severe effect than removing that player, and affecting 10-11 players’ results. And you also have the added benefit of not having to extend the duration of your MMP tourney.

In the rare cases where someone drops early from MMP, a small # of players are affected.
In the case of FF, every FF ever held (I’m guessing) has differing # of games played per player, affecting nearly every player.

So from a competitive fairness standpoint, MMP > FF.

If your local players prefer FF, then absolutely run FF, and enjoy!

I see min 4 scenarios where players quit before the tournament is over.

1. beginners are playing. They don’t really care about playing to the end. They are not used to play a tournament for 8 hours. At some point they don’t want to play anymore and quit. Of course, they don’t give this as a reason.

2. a lot of rounds are played, maybe even over 2 days. Let’s say 40 rounds are played. After 37 rounds a player realizes that he has no chance to reach the final and quits. Of course, they don’t give this as a reason.

3. real emergency. The player has to quit.

4. Example: our league evenings. Most join just for fun. We used to play swiss system. Always on Fridays until 11:30 PM. Many do not take the league so seriously and go home before end, because it is too late for them, We had tried it once with MM but have gone away from MM back to the Swiss system.

Whoa – I wouldn’t use MMP for an EIGHT-hour tournament. And definitely not for beginners for that long.

Again, I wouldn’t use MMP for a tournament of that duration. My MMP tourneys run for approx. 3 hours.

I would suggest using the concept I described above re: whether to delete the quitting player’s results or to have future opponents of the quitter gain an automatic win.

Most importantly: use the format that your community values the most and thinks is the most fun.

@Snailman
In Germany, we do mostly head-to-head Swiss sometimes over 2 days.
It works well if a beginner want to quit without any problem.
I wanted to replace with MM which works well as long nobody decides to quit before end.
As specially it is a real big problem if this happens short before end we went back to head to head swiss.

The only way to solve problem is that you give players manual new oponents by changing manualy the pairing. In the end all left players have same amount of games.
Ì hope in future the software will be able to do this.
I am even not sure if it is IFPA-Conform if some players get points as present for people who left the tournament. In the same time, others get a 0 because they lost against the player who left the tournament.

If players drop out shortly before the end of the tournament and games are deleted, this can become a problem, because then games for a few players have to be made up for.
Last weekend I spoke to a country director who I had asked if it is legal to give away ponts if I don’t delete a player who leaves the tournament. He said that taking points away from someone because another player leaves the tournament is not fair either. So you can also give the points to the remaining players as present.
So in the future, if a player leaves after playing 50% of the games, I will not delete him and the opponent will get 1 point if he has to play against him.

but it may be better to add an fake player and not give anyone free buys outside of maybe 1-2 if needed but not 3-10 free buys.

Does anyone know if the number of choices for player order have been decreased for Max Matchplay? I thought that I’d seen ‘Original seed’ as an option before, but it’s nowhere to be seen. Since I would like the higher ranked to play second ball, because that would speed things up, it would surely be a good idea to have this choice also for Max Matchplay.

I think it’s worth the slight addition in tourney time to have the more fair option of Balanced play order. As the highest IFPA rank player in most of the local tourneys I play in (and organize), I would not feel right about always getting to play as second/last player.

Further, varying the player order teaches your player community the pros/cons of playing first or second, versus having to generally play one or the other, based on their IFPA rank.

Last, alongside your fellow TD’s, use the Runaway Score rule appropriately to allow you to skip over the Runaway player’s 3rd ball, and if a modern Stern, set it to 4 ball (and then back again, after the game is over).

The “original seed” option is not present on Max Match Play tournaments because you can’t seed players in a Max Match Play tournament.

That aside: It’s a terrible player order option. If I could go back in time I would never have added it to the software. It’s really only good for tournaments where players are picking their own positions and you can use the original seed to signal who gets to pick first.

Any chance of adding an Advanced or Extended (whatever you want to call it) option in ladder format. Where as the first place on machine only advances.

Starts with 10 seeded players: #7, #8, #9, #10

#7 wins, #8, #9, #10 play on next machine, #8 Wins, #9, #10 play on next machine, #9 Wins, #10 is eliminated and the next round starts with #6, #7, #8, #9

Bonus if you can add an option for the final 2 to be played as a best of format but not needed as I am guessing that will be harder to program.

Thanks for all your hard work!!!

I do a lot of Max Match Play event as corporate events, would he super helpful if the players waiting showed on the big screen view. Many thanks for all your hard work!

Just ran our 1st max match play event. Just went in pretty blind. It worked out. Do you always have to manually generate new matches or is there a way to do that automatically?

You have to generate them yourselves. Depending on how many players you have I like to wait until I get at least 8 into the waiting area before initiating more games to be played.

OK awesome thanks! Yes I learned that when you generate too quickly it is not ideal. Me and my friend were playing on No Fear, finished game, generated too quickly and ended up playing No Fear again against same buddy but in reverse order!!

I posted this in the Match Play thread but was recommended to also post it here.

I finally had someone leave mid-tourney in a Max Match Play tournament and had a chance to put my workaround to the test.

Basically, if a player leaves I add a new Dummy Player and Dummy Arena, then I take the current match the absent player is on, replace their opponent with the Dummy Player and change their arena to the Dummy Arena and just leave them there while the tournament goes on. This way, the player’s completed games are not disregarded so their previous opponents are not affected other than dragging down their Strength-of-Opponent tiebreaker value.

As an added bonus, after missing a few rounds, he showed back up and I was easily able to add him back in by completing his match with the dummy player, and then deleting the dummy player and removing the dummy arena from the tournament.

Im sure there are plenty of ways for this approach to mess up in some way but, in this instance, it worked out well.

@haugstrup recently added a new feature for Max Match Play.

If a player leaves the tournament early you now have a choice between deleting all matches involving that player or leaving those matches intact. Choose the option that best fits your tournament.

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I think it’s great to have this option, but using it does have the potential of causing some other trouble for the tournament. This problem comes up when you use the new option to not delete matches for someone leaves after playing an odd number of matches. I wrote up my thoughts on how the TD can adapt the tournament to handle this situation when it comes up. There’s no best answer here as they all have pros and cons. I suggest you pick a strategy (or a decision tree of strategies for different circumstances), write that plan into your IFPA calendar submission, and stick to it if the issue comes up.

Options for handling the problem

A. Deactivate the player who left then delete their most recent result. Their opponent from that game will have to play a game against someone else to replace their deleted game.

B. Include the player who left in pairings one more time. That opponent gets a free win. Then deactivate the player who left.

C. Do nothing when they leave and get lucky when a different player leaves later in the tournament also with an odd number of games played. (They balance each other out.)

D. At the end of the tournament, when the last pairing is created you’ll have 1 player waiting with 1 game to play and at least one active match with 2 players on their last game. Play that game as a 3-player game. Use adjust points to give the waiting player +1 point if they get 1st or 2nd.

E. At the end of the tournament, pair the player who needs a game with someone who already has the maximum number of games. This game is not recorded in match play. If the player who needs a game wins give them a +1 point adjustment. The points of the player who they’re paired against is not affected by the result of this game. (Recommendation to choose this player as someone who is one point ahead of the player who needs a game so they have some natural incentive to defend their spot in the standings rather than giving up a point and creating a tie.)

F. Increase the duration by 1. (Only works if you started with an even number of players.)

Combining options

You may want your tournament’s rules to lay out a plan for different solutions depending on the situation.

Here are some examples:

A + B: In the situation where a player leaves the tournament early we will evaluate whether that would result in a situation where the tournament ends with impossible pairings (e.g. the player had completed an odd number of matches). If it does and the departing player had won their previous match, that match result will be deleted and their previous opponent will get a chance at replaying that game with a different opponent. If the previous match was a loss for the departing player, then they will be included in pairing one more time and the player in the new pairing will get an automatic win (i.e. the player is not considered dropped until they do not show up for that newly paired match).

F + C + D: In the situation where a player leaves the tournament early we will evaluate whether that would result in a situation where the tournament ends with impossible pairings (e.g. the player had completed an odd number of matches). If the tournament had started with an even number of players we will increase the tournament duration by +1 match. Otherwise, we’ll wait until the end of the tournament before addressing the situation. If another player leaves later also with an odd number of games completed then no changes will be needed. If we get to the end of the tournament where creating matches results in one player left with a single game to play and all other players paired off for their final game, then we’ll randomly choose one of the games that was just created and will play that as a 3 player game. We’ll randomly determine player order for that game. Match result and Adjust Points will be used to record the result such that the 1st and 2nd place players both get a point and the 3rd place player does not get a point.

Many thanks for the implementation. This helps a lot.

In Europe, a lot of head-to-head is played, but more often Swiss than MM
One of the reasons for this is that you have to do some tricks at the end of the tournament to make it work without that you have duplicate pairings.
It’s very good that you can limit the number of simultaneous games, but you still don’t have a direct influence on who gets paired.
-It would be great for the future if you could pause players who have already played a lot more games than the others. It would also have the benefit for exampe of allowing players to eat without stress.
-As an alternative to “Create number of matches” would be creating matches only for players with already played maximum X number of games would also be a good idea for the future.
As my english is not perfect here an example: Some players have played only 8 games, but some have already played 12, you could then determine that only players who have played a maximum of 11 games are drawn.

Have you tried it? I think the new feature can be used to accomplish what you described as pausing a player.

Deactivate the player who needs to be paused; uncheck the delete matches checkbox; activate them again when they return.

You may need to keep an eye on the number of matches other players play while someone is paused. If you go past a round robin then I would expect repeat pairings before everyone has played the paused player. There’s nothing wrong with that necessarily, but it may not be what you and your players expect.

I just tested it and it works great. Would it be possible to set the checkbox for deleting players with the last entry?
I run MM tournaments with more than 50 players. For example, last third of the tournament, I would have to uncheck 5-15 players every round. It is also very dangerous if you want to be quick and accidentally and want to pause a player but forget to uncheck it. Since there is no further warning, all games would be deleted, which could be a disaster.

Since this function is certainly used extremely often just to pause players, it is perhaps safer to generally set the checkbox directly so that the games are not deleted, so that such an Desaster does not happen.

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I have another question:
Over the years many duplicate players have been created. Some of them even have the dublicate IFPA numbers.
Is it possible to delete duplicate players or do I just have to rename them?

Problem with rename is that in older tournaments, Name would also shown renamed.

That’s fine feedback. I’ve change the checkbox so it defaults to off.

There’s an entire player merge tool available so you can merge duplicate players: Match Play Events

You can also “retire” players. Then they won’t show up when you look for players in new tournaments.

Great many thanks for your support.
You do really great job with matchplay.events

The duplicate IFPA numbers should be fixed by the IFPA. Honestly this should never happen as it’s quite possible to cheat/“sandbag” this way.

That’s a misunderstanding. No same IFPA number for different player
There are same duplicate player with same ifpa-number

The new option to pause players by temporarily deactivating them is a great thing. This way, everyone can take a break when they want and it’s particularly useful in my location because there’s simply not enough space for everyone to take a meal break at the same time with almost 60 players.

However, the deactivation function is too time-consuming in larger tournaments to pause players who have played almost all the rounds towards the end of the tournament so that everyone plays the last two rounds at the same time to avoid multiple identical pairings.

I used the following trick: 28 rounds were planned. Previously, I also had a limited number of 24 rounds. When almost everyone had reached 24 rounds, I increased it to 26 rounds and when most of the 26 rounds were reached, I increased it to the final 28 rounds.

This is a lot of work and confuses the players. As I have mentioned before, it would be better not to specify how many games are created when creating the rounds, but to specify that “only players who have played a maximum of x rounds” are drawn. This is the only way to ensure that you don’t end up having to play the same players repeatedly without too much effort for the TD.

Yesterday, we had an MM tournament with 58 players.

For me, this is still the best head-to-head tournament format. I was very pleasantly surprised by the new layout. For example, you can now see the number of rounds played for both active and inactive players.
We used the trick I mention here. In the end, we only had one pairing that had played each other twice.

However, I had the feeling that, in general, the pairings had been improved with the current software version and that players who had played many more rounds than the others were not drawn.
Is that the case, or was my perception incorrect?

Nothing has changed in the pairing algorithm, but I’m glad you like the layout changes

The layout turned out great overall.

We organized a small MM test tournament. I noticed that, as scorekeeper, I was able to enter my results on my cell phone, which created duplicate player-pairing after drawing a new game.

As a note to everyone, please enter results on a single terminal only to prevent this from happening.

While flip frenzy tournaments should only have results entered on a single device the same is not true for Max MP tournaments. For Max MP you can use multiple devices.

In Max MP you can in some cases end up with the same players playing each other back-to-back. For example, if both players have a spot open for a repeat opponent.

Sorry for confusion. My fault. It was flip-frenzy when I entered a result on my phone and it made error in new pairings.

In MM of course you can enter your result without any issues.
The only error I had in MM when “create new games” same time on 2 devices.

We have a very big problem with an MM tournament that we started today and will continue tomorrow.

It is a certified tournament, so there are 40 rounds in total.
Since we want to avoid double pairings, we initially scheduled 36 rounds and wanted to gradually increase to 38 and then 40 after everyone had completed their 36 rounds, as we have been doing for a long time.

There was no fixed break, so we offered each participant a flexible maximum 1-hour break by deactivating and reactivating the players.

What we had seen before was that deactivating and reactivating the players caused the “Remaining Games” to be displayed incorrectly, which we had always ignored.

Now, even though the players were between 33 and 36 rounds, 0 remaining games were displayed and new pairings were not allowed:
And that at this stage:

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We helped ourselves by increasing the rounds to 38, which allowed us to continue playing.
We changed all pairings manually so that we took a break at 36 rounds.
We are now very afraid that we will experience something similar again tomorrow.

It is now midnight here in Germany. I am going to sleep now and would be happy to finish the tournament tomorrow morning without it happening again that no more games can be generated before the 40 rounds have been played.

Your problem is likely your mass deactivation of players throughout the tournament. As you know Max MP for the longest time would force the TD to delete matches when deactivating a player.

Some TDs insisted that this is not what they wanted so I added an option to let matches remain when a player is deactivated. I included a warning that the app wouldn’t be able to guarantee that the tournament would be able to conclude properly in when used. I guess I should’ve made that warning even more clear.

Do not mass deactivate players. When creating matches MP needs to know how many players are in the tournament in order to decide how many potential repeat opponents are available. If you deactivate players that count will be wrong and you can end up in a situation like yours.

So let me repeat again: Do not deactivate players to give them a “break” and your tournament should be fine.

There is now a mandatory checkbox that must be checked before deactivating players in Max MP. It was either that or go back to the old way where a player’s matches would always be deleted.

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A long time ago, I suggested that it would be very useful for MM to be able to give players breaks. There are many reasons for this. At some locations, it is not possible to give everyone a break at the same time due to space constraints. It would also be helpful to be able to give technicians or other co-organizers who are playing themselves flexible breaks.

The response at the time was to deactivate players as needed after the software was adjusted and their games no longer had to be deleted.

A major issue is the effort required to avoid having the same players compete against each other multiple times at the end of the tournament. I try to control this by, for example, allowing 16 rounds out of 20 planned rounds at first, then increasing to 18, and only going to 20 at the end. Nevertheless, it happens that players have duplicate opponents. Before I handled it this way, the problem was even bigger because many ended up playing each other multiple times while others were already finished.

I have only one concern that would make MM perfect from my point of view, and I have mentioned it before: When drawing lots, it should be possible to specify that only players with a maximum of x rounds will be chosen. Currently, you can only set the maximum number of games to be generated, but that doesn’t help because players who have almost completed all rounds are often selected simply because no other opponents can be found.

I love MM, but many in Europe don’t use it because it doesn’t work as easily as a Swiss system.

While in Europe, outside of Pingolf and Group Matchplay, around 95 percent of games are played head-to-head and only around 5 percent are card-based, in the US it feels like the opposite is true: over 90 percent of formats there are card-based, with less than 10 percent head-to-head.

Hello,

I play about 30 tournament days per year in europe. Last year in Germany, Spain, Poland, Finnland. The tournaments I played @pinmaniacs place had been very efficient and the day had a very nice flow. One of the reasons for this is Max Matchplay being used. However there is still room for improvement, and I think the possibillity to give players breaks would be very beneficial. Personally I like to stay in the flow and not do long lunchbreaks. For this having a pause of 10-15min with a “log off/pause button” would be perfect.

Also the points mentioned for technicians and co-organisers are very valid.
At the end of the day, with a pause button and good organisations 35 to 40 games should be doable on one day and a great experience.

“it should be possible to specify that only players with a maximum of x rounds will be chosen.” This also makes a lot of sense.

Kind Regards

Sebastian

It might be a good idea to add a function that allows players to be paused — not deactivated (with the associated fair deletion of matches), but simply marked as temporarily unavailable. This way, the matchmaking logic (max MP) can take into account potentially recurring opponents while being able to skip paused players when creating new matches. In cases where an active player has no available opponents left except for one or more paused players, that player can either be paused as well with a notification or simply remain in the waiting queue, also with a corresponding message.

This is just an idea I’d like to put out there, without having a deep understanding of the underlying max MP algorithms.

Overall, I think the ability to pause for 20–30 minutes during a long max MP tournament would be very useful, and I would really appreciate it if this could be implemented technically in this format.

Additionally, this would mean that the tournament director wouldn’t have to set a lower number of rounds just to manually ensure everyone ends up playing the same number. For example, @pinmanic as a TD could simply set the total number of rounds to 40, and max MP would handle the pairings. In the worst case, some active players may have to wait longer than necessary because their potential opponents are on a break.

To avoid disrupting the tournament flow too much, breaks could be allowed only for players who have already completed a significant number of rounds. In other words, you’d have to play a certain amount before being eligible to pause without negatively impacting the flow.

As I said, these are just some spontaneous thoughts that I believe could make this awesome format even better.

Looking forward to flipping some more ideas around with you – cheers
Daniel

So, we are holding a Maxmatchplay tournament next year with 100ish players and 35-40 machines. With a que that large I assume we can just start the next match as soon as a game is done and the software will have no problems?

It also depends on how many games you have each player play. Generally speaking I would still be keeping an eye on the queue to make sure that no player ends up far ahead or far behind the same as if it was a smaller tournament.

I love the MM format and was very happy that you fulfilled my wish in December 2024 to allow players flexible breaks by making it possible to deactivate them. This allowed us to play Max Matchplay in January 2025 with 60 players and 40 rounds in a relaxed manner. We paid close attention in the end and everything worked perfectly.

I noticed that the calculated number of remaining rounds was displayed incorrectly and even became negative. However, that didn’t bother us. Apparently, the software was changed later so that no further rounds can be started if the calculated number of remaining games is zero or below. During our tournament in August, this meant that we had to increase the number of rounds and manually adjust the pairings at the same time because some players had already reached the maximum number of rounds.

It would be great if the software could ignore the calculated remaining rounds as before. Many tournament directors would be happy if they could once again deactivate players at their own risk so that flexible breaks for participants remain possible.

I haven’t made changed to Max MP in so long that I can’t remember. What’s the error message you get when creating matches?

There was no error message. There were still a few rounds left, but there was no way to create games. The reason for this was that the calculation of the remaining number of games was 0. I believe that in the January tournament, due to deactivations, the calculation of the remaining games was even negative.

So if you allow the number of remaining games to be less than 0 (due to deactivations), it is important that you continue to let create rounds as long as not everyone has completed their games.

I have reopened the tournament. Rounds set to 42. Then deactivated some players. As you can see, there is no button to create new round even though no one has more than 41 rounds.

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Perhaps it is because the calculated number of remaining rounds is negative?
You would be very helpful if new rounds were allowed as long as not everyone has played all rounds.
My location is too small, so we can’t all take a break at the same time. I would be very grateful if you could solve the problem for us.

As a big fan of Max Matchplay, I would like to tell you about our experiences at a “Certified 200% TGP” tournament with individual breaks. We played 40 rounds, which presented a special logistical challenge due to our limited space and over 50 participants.

Since it is physically impossible to send all players on a break at the same time, we had to act flexibly. In addition, there were participants who had to check into their hotel in between, or technicians who had to pause briefly during the tournament. Since officially pausing players in this way is no longer intended, I manually deactivated and later reactivated players – even though you have to confirm that they have actually left the tournament.

During this, we noticed the following technical problem: Deactivating players causes the calculation of the remaining games to become incorrect. In the display, the number of remaining games drops below the actual value. As soon as this value is less than zero, Max Matchplay no longer allows new rounds to be generated, even if the set number of rounds has not yet been reached. In our case, this happened at an average of about 37 rounds: the display showed -15 and the system blocked further draws.

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Our workaround (the trick): To continue the tournament, we created two dummy players. This caused the calculated number of games to rise above zero again, and the system released the draw. The system randomly selected Dummy1 against Dummy2. We never entered a result so that they would not be included in the draw again.

In the end, we specifically generated the number of games so that all participants first reached 39 rounds. With one final draw, everyone was then able to complete their 40 rounds.

Conclusion: Thanks to this trick, we were able to finish the tournament perfectly. The players were very satisfied, as the flexible pausing took the stress factor out of this intense tournament format.

Can you explain a little more about what you mean by this?

The weakness of MM is that if, as tournament director, you don’t make sure that too many players reach the maximum number of games (in this case 40) before everyone else has reached 39, some players will end up having to play each other twice or even three times.

I solve this problem by, for example, creating a few games until all players who have completed 36 games are playing, if there are only players who have completed 36-39 games left. I do the same thing one round later with players who have completed 37 games, creating games until all players who have completed 37 games are playing. Then I do the same with players who have played 38 games. After that, there are only players who have played 39 games and those who have completed all 40 games. In the final draw, as many players as possible still have their last game to play, so that it is less likely that players will have to play each other multiple times.

It would be much more helpful if you offered the option of only drawing players who have completed a maximum of x games, rather than specifying how many games are created, because this option does not prevent some players from having already completed all their games while others still have a few games left to play.