8 players, 2 foursomes over 14 days

[Vic Cheropita(Guest)]

Richard,

8 of us are golfing in Solvang in January/06 for 14 days and want to set up a schedule so that we all golf with each other an equal number of times, with 2 foursomes per round, can this be done?

Regards, Vic

Tuesday, November 8 2005, 04:13 pm
Sherwood Park, Alberta, Canada

[Ian Wakeling]

Vic,

It is possible to arrange 7 rounds of foursomes such that each of the 8 players gets to play together with the other 7 players exactly 3 times.

So I have made a suitable schedule below that is balanced for rounds 1-7 as well as for rounds 8-14.

Round
 1   (2 8 7 5)   (3 1 4 6)
 2   (7 1 8 4)   (5 2 6 3)
 3   (8 6 2 4)   (7 3 1 5)
 4   (1 6 5 8)   (3 4 7 2)
 5   (8 3 7 6)   (2 4 1 5)
 6   (3 8 2 1)   (6 5 4 7)
 7   (4 5 3 8)   (1 6 7 2)
 8   (2 7 8 6)   (4 3 5 1)
 9   (4 6 8 1)   (5 7 3 2)
10   (8 4 2 3)   (7 5 6 1)
11   (1 8 3 7)   (5 2 6 4)
12   (6 3 5 8)   (1 7 4 2)
13   (8 1 2 5)   (7 4 3 6)
14   (4 8 5 7)   (6 2 1 3)

You could use this property to decide on a winner for each week as well as the overall winner.  The foursomes are also arranged so that each player appears either 3 or 4 times in each of the four positions in a foursome, and so this could be used to balance the tee-off order within a foursome as fairly as possible.

Regards,

Ian.

Thursday, November 10 2005, 02:38 am