Round Robin Tournament Scheduling

Complementary Home/Away Patterns in Unbalanced Leauges

DavidA122 · 3 · 2705

DavidA122

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Hey guys,

I've been taking a look at scheduling some matches for an upcoming local pub pool league. There's a number of constraints due to the home/away nature of the league and multiple teams playing from the same pub.

We've got 2 divisions, one of 10 (div 1) and one of 12 (div 2). This might be our first problem, but here are the constraints:

- Division 1 has 3 pairs of teams requiring alternating home/away patterns. Pretty easy to do with the spreadsheet from Ian
- Division 2 has 2 pairs of teams requiring alternating home/away patterns. Again, pretty easy to do.
- I need 3 pairs of alternating home/away patterns between the divisions. No amount of fixture-swapping between weeks seems to be producing a 3rd pattern. I can manage 2 patterns, but this will always result in two teams (one in each division) being scheduled to play on the same table.

Is it possible to make transformations to the fixtures to have 3 (or more) matching home/away patterns between the divisions, or do I need to look at generating a 12-team fixture set for Division 1 and add 2 "BYE" teams?

Cheers all


DavidA122

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Reply #1 on: May 09, 2019, 10:32:51 AM
Quick update on this, due to some internal politics we're actually moving to an 11/11 split, but I'm interested to know the answer to my original question from a theoretical/mathematical standpoint!

I'll add further updates if I make any additional progress on the problem.


Ian Wakeling

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Reply #2 on: May 10, 2019, 02:40:48 AM
If I have understood correctly, then I think this is possible.  Before generating the 10 and 12 team schedules with the spreadsheet, select "Do not randomize", then the home/away patterns will be similar in both schedules and you should be able to assign the between division pairs easily.

Best,

Ian