Tourney Swiss Bracket HU Tournament (1 Viewer)

[FestiveKnight]

Hosting a large party Memorial Day weekend and I’ve gotten the group jazzed up on the idea of a Swiss bracket HU NLHM tournament so now I have to actually figure out the structure.

Here are parameters:

We will have 5 hours to play total. Should have 12-16 players

Following the general rules that x Swiss rounds is sufficient for up to 2^x players and that rounds should be roughly 1/3 of players I am think 4 rounds.

I would like each round to be a Bo3

I have used this @BGinGA structure many times for HU with friends and quite liked it

But I worry that as currently designed it’ll go a bit too long. I imagine there will be 30 min of wasted time organizing groups and moving people so there’s 4.5 hours of play time. 4 rounds of games that go to game 3 with 30 min games is 6 hours so that’s a no go.

An option is to make each round just 2 games and do something like, win both = +5, tie = +2, lose = 0

That’s then 8 games total which should be closer to 4 hours.

The other route is to make each game go fast than 30 min (on average). To get the timing to work I’d probably need to get them down to 20 min per game. That is possible with lowering the time per level to 4 min but that seems insane.

Thoughts?

How would you do payouts? How would you do tie break? There won’t be time for additional tie breaker games.

 

[FestiveKnight]

Bump. Any advice?

 

[BGinGA]

Modified Swiss Movement events are not uncommon in pro backgammon tournaments; Butch Meese (IN) and I pioneered the early format development and modification for backgammon back in the early '80s.

Backgammon tournaments are structurally very similar to NLHE heads-up events.

A Modified Swiss format allows for additional play, pairing players with identical/similar win-loss records in subsequent rounds (unlike round-robin, where everybody plays everybody). The format takes longer than a single-elimination or even a double-elimination bracket format, so is not a good choice when time constraints exist. A loss threshold is established, at which point players are eliminated (typically three losses).

For your purposes, I think I'd just run a single-elimination bracket (Bo3) with a progressively-fed Consolation bracket for losers. Pays 1st-2nd Main plus 1st Cons (equal to 2nd place money), with optional payout to 2nd Cons (pending field size).

Your Bo2 idea is interesting, but not sure even that will allow for a Swiss event to complete in your desired time frame for more than 8 players.

Feel free to PM/email me of you'd like to discuss further.