Making the draws

"Making the draws" refers to the process by which players are grouped into "draws", i.e. cohorts within which they will play each other. Such cohorts vary in size from 4 to 16 or 32 players, though the most common draw size at New Zealand tournaments is the 8-draw, followed by 6 & 4, and only tournaments with a Sunday finish have 16 or 12, 9 or 5-draws.

Once the draws have been made, it'll become increasingly more difficult to make changes between cohorts, and so it is a good idea to delay putting significant time into the draws until a week or two before the tournament. Nevertheless, depending on the number of registrations, and changes you've had to deal with, it may be necessary to draft up some draws at random times beforehand, to identify holes that may need to be plugged e.g. by moving people over from the waiting list, and inviting other players.

Therefore, you will want to delay making the draws until after sending out a "final call" to all registered players, and giving them enough time to get back to you with any changes. But you don't want to leave your players waiting too long, and it's generally good practice to have the draws finished on the weekend prior to your tournament — don't worry about results of a current tournament not having been entered yet.

Applying for a TournamentControl event

Now is a good time to apply for a TournamentControl event. Thorndon has an unlimited plan, so you can add notifications, and avoid payment. You also don't need to specify a public IP address.

Seeding registrations

Strictly speaking, draws are made in decreasing order of grading points at the time of "seeding the tournament", which is a required step on iSquash prior to extracting the list of registrations — where "required" means that you should do it, not that iSquash would in any way force you to. However, if you use ?tctools to snapshot the registrations, it'll do it automatically for you.

When a player registers for an event, they are entered with their grading points at the time of their entry. When you register a player for an event, they are actually entered with an effective grading of 0, which is not useful at all. Using the "Seed tournament" button in the "Pre-tournament" management section on iSquash, you can snapshot the current grading for each registered player, to give a consistent picture.

The dialog also gives you a means by which you can override the grading for individual players, though this should be used sparringly. Common use cases include that a result has been entered wrongly, or too late. It's important to note that overriding the grading here only affects the order in which players appear in the registration table; It does not actually affect their grading, or have any influence on how the results from the tournament get calculated.

Even though draws should be made in decreasing order of grading points, tournament control has a bit of wiggle room, which may be required in certain cases, usually involving travelling players and time constraints. You are free to assign people to draws later in any order you choose, but wiggling their grading points at the time of seeding leaves a better paper trail of such actions, and ensures reproducible results.

tctools and The Draw Maker

Extracting registrations from iSquash gives you a spreadsheet that you can play around with to make the draws, and with the ?tctools comes a spreadsheet designed to make this process a lot easier, even enjoyable, called the "DrawMaker". Once you've loaded the registrations and waiting list, you can

  • easily pick&choose players into draws;
  • quickly see what contact details you're missing;
  • record player restrictions and analyse the effects these restrictions have on what days matches can take place;
  • and also plan out early games to be played on Wednesday and Thursday, so as to minimise the number of games that need to be played on Saturday morning, which is the main bottleneck of any tournament with a Saturday finish;
  • get access to a number of useful and less useful statistics;
  • automatically import the draws into iSquash.

Usage of the Draw Maker is explained on the project's homepage, and there are even some videos.

For now, we'll assume that you've arrived at a final set of player-to-draw assignments by any means, and are ready to move on.

Creating draws in iSquash

Once you're happy with the draws, you need to go back to iSquash to create the draws, and assign the players according to what you've designed. Unfortunately, this is a cumbersome part of the process, and unless you use tctools and the DrawMaker, there is unfortunately no way around it, and it's required so that you can later record results and propagate them to the grading list.

Even if you are using the DrawMaker, please ensure that you know what's going on. It might still be a good idea to keep reading, although the following will all be done for you:

While you are in the process of creating draws, it might be a good idea to untick "Show under Current Tournaments" in the iSquash settings of the event, and only tick that box again when you're done.

Please refer to the iSquash tournament module manual for how to use iSquash to create draws, though the process is pretty self-explanatory.

For each draw you create, you have to enter a few pieces of data:

  1. The type of draw: Most options here are self-explanatory. The 3 different 6-draws are: round-robin, type B, and type C. Type B means that the draw is split into a top and a bottom draw in the first round, and then these play a round-robin within each. Type C means that two round-robins are played across all 6 players (1,4,5 and 2,3,6), and then the #1's play each other, as do the #2's and the #3's. It's a matter of taste which one you'll play, though type C might work best when the draw is very close, i.e. there is not a lot of points between the top and the bottom seed. This cannot be changed later.

  2. Gender/sex: This also cannot be changed later. Even if you have one member of the opposite gender/sex play, it needs to be Mixed, and it also needs to be Mixed if you want to include any ungraded/international players.

  3. Draw name: Make it short. This is usually of the form "M1", "W2", and "J3". Note that an Open division is usually abbreviated e.g. "MO", but this means that the Open division will show up below the numbered divisions, which is at least aesthetically displeasing. Therefore, considerung using "M0" instead.

  4. Draw description: Just spell it out, e.g. "Men's Div 1" or "Women's Open"

  5. Draw Round: See manual.

  6. Lock Draw: to prevent accidental modifications, tick this when you're done.

Seeding draws

When you click "Seed Draw" for a draw, you get to fill in the slots with players. If your list of registered players is already properly ordered (because you (ab)used the registration seeding functionality), then you can just pick the top seed and hit "Populate", or make the choices manually.

Whenever you make changes to the players, don't forget to visit the "Matches" page for each draw, and hit "Initialize Matches". Yes, it's cumbersome, but it's necessary for results entry (and other reasons).

Once the draws are all seeded and matches initialised, you can tick the "Show under Current Tournaments" box again in the Pre-Tournament settings.

Using the DrawMaker and tctools

The tctools come with a script called manage_isquash_tournament.py which can manage player registrations, create draws, and seed them. Please refer to its documentation for more info.

Scheduling matches

Scheduling matches is the most painful part of tournament organisation, as it is literally the attempt to fit a couple of hundred square pegs through round holes, with players having restrictions and preferences left and right. One way to facilitate this is to flat-out refuse to honour more than one restriction (and announce this in the event description).

The DrawMaker does allow you to record the days on which players cannot play, and it will then assign the games to days. This works for 8, 6b, and 4 draws, and allows you to focus only on a subset of games at a time, which should make scheduling a fair bit easier.

Another way to make it easier for you is to use TournamentControl instead of iSquash scheduling. TournamentControl also makes running the tournament a lot easier, and so that is the natural way, but first, let's draw some lines around terms.

  1. There is match scheduling, which is absolutely required so that you'll have worked through all the constraints, and your players know when to turn up;

  2. And then there is match scheduling on iSquash which is:

    a. an absolute pain in terms of usability; b. not strictly necessary, if the players know where else to obtain the information.

If you choose not to schedule matches in iSquash because you cannot be assed to do a woefully repetitive and error-prone task by hand, then the diagrams players can view for their draws on iSquash won't have times, nor will the tables listing their matches. If you can ensure that the players know where else to get this information, then it's perfectly fine to forego the pain and skip this step.

One way in which the players can find out is through TournamentControl, but that does not work on iPhones (August 2021). However, as part of tctools, there is tc2web, which puts live tournament information on a web page that anyone can use (click here for an example).

Let's go ?schedule!