Pub pool tournament - advice needed ...

[DandyA]

my local pub, the North Star in Staines has started running a friendly pool tournament (all welcome) on a Wednesday evening starting at 8pm ... £3 to enter, £2 goes to the winner of the main tournament, the other £1 enters you into the game of killer afterwards (the table is on free-play) ...

it's been going 2 weeks and we've had 10 and 9 players playing - so far we've invented some rules to try to make sure everyone gets 2 games and we have proved we can get a round of 16, 8, 4, 2 (15 games in total) completed before last orders

but in both cases, we made up the tournament rules as we went along ...

so I was wondering if any experienced tournament organisers (or mathematical geniuses) could give me a simple solution to this problem ... we don't know how many players will turn up, we'd like to allow for late arrivals too if possible, and we'd like to play around 15 frames or so over the whole tournament...

any help would be really appreciated

[Belloz22]

The only way i could see it working is using something that i know is used of the fighting game circuit - using a losers bracket - so basically every would get a minimum of 2 frames that way. Prob is you may find you end up with loads of frames over the night.....


Just to give you an example:

Say you have 16 players, 8 games technically - 8 would win and 8 would lose - so thw 8 winners go into a winners bracket, the 8 losers go into a loser bracket

Next the 8 losers play each other - 4 frames - so you have 4 winners in the loser bracket and 4 losers who are automatically out

Next the 8 winners in the winners brackets play each other - 4 winners go through to next stage of winners bracket, 4 losers drop into loser bracket. These 4 losers now play the 4 winners from the orginal losers matches - so you will get 4 winners and 4 losers who are out aswell.

Now the 4 people in the loser bracket now play each other - 2 frame - leaving you with 2 winners and 2 losers who are now out

The 2 winners in the winners bracket now play each other, with the winner going to the grand final, and the loser going into the losers final

The last 2 people in the losers bracket now play each other, with the winner playing the original loser in the winners final.

The winner of that then plays the original winner bracket final winner in the grand final for the overall tournament winner!!!

Very complicated in words but simple - and it means even if you lose you still can have a chance to win the tournament

[RogiBear]

Easiest way is to use a double elimination as described above. However you can use excel to create a spreadsheet to output the most logical breakdown of say group stage and then knockout depending on how many players have entered. Which is how I run tournaments at Uni.