Irregular Round Robin?

[appie3]

Maybe I overlooked it, but just got caught in setting up a tournament schedule for hockey that is dealing with a shortage of fields and time, but with plenty of teams. For example, 29 teams play on 8 fields and 10 rounds or 23 teams, 7 fields, 10 rounds. And every team should play an equal amount of games (or some 1 more). I figured it out, manually, this year, but does anyone know if there is a programm which can handle these variables (#teams, #fields, #rounds, equal amount of games) and make my life for next year a lot easier?  

[Ian Wakeling]

If you have a Windows PC then you could try my program here.

There is no documentation or guarantee that it will work, but I think it will solve the two problems you give above.

You are dealing with an incomplete round-robin, so the first thing is to go to advanced and check the box the says "allow partial round-robin for singles".  Then just dial in your parameters:

Singles Play/29 teams/8 venues/10 rounds/Balance venues.

Additionally I would enable blocking and choose to play rounds in blocks of 2, everyone should gets at least one game in every block thus spreading their matches evenly across the 10 rounds.

Hope that helps.

[appie3]

Thx Ian,
It seems to be working as advertised. Super!
The goal is to have every team play the same amount (+/- 1) of matches, but does the program include also the option to have a team not be bye for 2 consecutive rounds?

Just wondering :-)

[Ian Wakeling]

Thanks for trying the program.  It does not optimize byes explicitly, but you can come close. Turn off the blocking and then enable the checkbox that says 'Minimize back-to-back matches'.   Try it both with and without balancing venues, as there is a trade-off here and you may get better byes without.   When venue balance is used, you may want to increase the maximum number of iterations under 'Advanced'.   Hope that helps.