Tournament Advice

[ryushen21]

Hey Everyone,

As the President of my school Billiard team, i kind of get the job of running our intercollegiate tournament this semester. We have three divisions, A, B, and C. I am trying to figure out the best way to get this done the quickest while still keeping it fun and competative. We have 11 tables that we will be using. The races are set at 7-6 for A, 5-4 for B, and 3-3 for C and we are playing 9-Ball. I am pretty sure that we will get around 75-100 players. I was thinking about giving A division about 5 tables since they play the fastest and splitting the other 6 evenly between B & C. That way A division is done in about 3 hours and the rest of those tables can go to the other divisions. A division usually has the smallest amount of players so they may finish even quicker. B & C are usually split even for the most players.

The main thing that I want to avoid is absurd downtimes. I attended a tournament last semester and had a 5+ hour downtime between matches. That is unacceptable for any tournament to have. Do you guys think that the current way will work out ok? I know that quite a few of you have actually done some tournament directing before and i was hoping to get your advice on a few things.

Thanks,
Matt

[dooziexx]

Can you explain why you have 3 division?? How do you prevent an A player from joining the C division?? Another alternative is to have one huge tourney 5-4 race...

[Bassn7]

Stick to race to 4 on the winners side and race to 3 on the losers side. Championship match: race to 7. Runs smoothly and no arguments about handicaps.

[ryushen21]

The whole thing is basically a trust system. Other Universities that we play with rank their players and place them in the appropriate divisions. However, we have had a few people trying to shark, and if that happens they get a DQ.

[ras314]

First I must say I am new to tournaments. Don't much like a rating system of any kind but since it seems to get more people playing I guess it is a useful concept.

Why split up tables for the different ratings? Seems the idea would be to never have an empty table just sitting there. Never ran anything but small bar tournaments myself so don't know the difficulty of running larger events.

BTW how did the table leveling go?

[woody_968]

I would consider making how many tables are available to each divison based on the number of players in that division. Say you have 100 players, and 50 are in the C rating (to make it simple) I would put half of the tables to the C division. Its true if you give a smaller division more tables they would be done faster freeing up tables. But as you go farther down the brackets the fewer tables you need anyway as people will be waiting on other matches to finish so they can play the winner or looser of that match. You might play around with the numbers and the brackets to see how it would fall out.

If you want to run the A bracket through quick to make room I would advise playing all the first round brackets on the A board first. Then starting the other brackets. Just explain to everyone what and why you are doing it so they dont think you are giving A players better treatment.