Several of my blogs have generated some great information from my readers, so this blog will be devoted to sharing that information with you.
Mike Darter, the founder of the Judo Podcast, was kind enough to introduce me to Score Judo, a Judo scoreboard for PC, which was developed in Australia as an application for use by all bona fide judo clubs anywhere in the world free of charge.
You’ll find not only downloadable Judo scoreboards and scoresheets, but also a circuit training timer for coaches. Best of all, besides the IJF format, there are modes for Kosen grappling and multiple ippons formats, which are of great benefit to us who are looking at creating and running developmental tournaments.
Lorenzo Lami emailed me about a Swiss tournament system. Since I knew absolutely nothing about it, I asked him to give me an example of how you would run a Judo tournament using this system. He was gracious enough to do just that. Here’s his explanation….
Let’s call our competitors 1, 2, 3, 4, …, 16.
Let’s use this notation for rankings: W-L-D (Win-Loss-Draw).
Let’s use this notation for pairings: 12:7 (which means competitor number 12 vs competitor number 7)
The swiss tournament is a flexible system, and it allows for draw. It has been used extensively in chess tournaments, where draws are very common. For this tournament however, for demonstration purposes, I will not allow draws.
Since this is a 16-man tournament, only 4 rounds are needed to get a winner; you may choose to have more rounds, but that’s your choice. Fewer rounds are strongly discouraged.
First round, I simply randomize pairings, and I get (for example):
16:2
11:12
10:6
9:15
4:3
14:1
7:8
5:13
…which result in these rankings after round one:
1 1-0
4 1-0
5 1-0
6 1-0
7 1-0
11 1-0
15 1-0
16 1-0
2 0-1
3 0-1
8 0-1
9 0-1
10 0-1
12 0-1
13 0-1
14 0-1
7:5
1:11
6:16
4:15
Now those at 0-1:
13:2
10:3
14:8
9:12
…which results in the following standings:
5 2-0
6 2-0
11 2-0
16 2-0
7 1-1
4 1-1
15 1-1
1 1-1
13 1-1
3 1-1
9 1-1
8 1-1
2 0-2
12 0-2
10 0-2
14 0-2
On to round 3. Randomizing in each score category, I get:
5:16
11:6
3:8
13:4
9:15
1:7
14:12
2:10
…which would be nice, if it weren’t for the pairing 9:15, which would make the same competitors fight twice (which is bad). So, I randomize again those at 1-1, and I get:
3:8
13:4
9:7
1:15
…which is fine. After all the fights have been fought, I get these standings:
16 3-0
6 3-0
5 2-1
11 2-1
8 2-1
4 2-1
9 2-1
1 2-1
12 1-2
10 1-2
3 1-2
13 1-2
15 1-2
7 1-2
14 0-3
2 0-3
Now, on to round 4, the final round. Unfortunately, competitor 8 got hurt in his last match, and is unable to fight. I remove him from the list, as he desires. This leaves us with the problem of pairing people at 2-1, which were six and now are five. I use what is called “downpairing”, so I pick a random man at 2-1 and pair him with a random man at 1-2. Now we have the same problem with people at 1-2, now they are five (because one has already been paired with the man at 2-1). I will downpair again, so I will pick another random man at 1-2 and pair him with one of the two man at 0-3. The other guy at 0-3, since there are no competitors left below him, gets an automatic win.
So, for round 4 we have:
16:6
1:5
11:9
4:3 -> downpairing
15:12
7:10
13:14 -> downpairing
2:bye (automatic win)
…which results in:
6 4-0
16 3-1
5 3-1
9 3-1
4 3-1
11 2-2
1 2-2
12 2-2
10 2-2
14 1-3
3 1-3
13 1-3
15 1-3
7 1-3
2 1-3
14 0-4
Which is our final standing. We have one winner, and then many others competitors with a lower score. We need a way to really sort them and make our true, fair, final rankings. In one word, we need tiebreakers. Tiebreakers are complicated ways to decide whether one competitor’s 3-1 is worth more than another competitor’s 3-1. For example, we would like to reward the man who fought the highest ranking competitors. I am not going to explain tiebreakers in detail, but I will if you want me to. You can find them on the Wikipedia.
Finally, we have our standings.
This might still not be enough if you want a clear 1st, 2nd and 3rd place. You might opt for a top-4 cutoff and run a 4-man single elimination, but just for those who made the top-4 in the final rankings. That’s why final rankings and tiebreaker are needed anyway.
Pairings would look like this:
1:4
2:3
…to reward 1, so he gets to fight a (presumably) weaker opponent. Run that 4-man tournament, and you have your medalists.
You can always combine the Swiss system with other systems, my favorite is a Swiss with cutoff followed by single elimination.
For our sake, software is on our sides. Sevilla is a great program for tournament organization, and it’s free also. It handles a lot of tiebreakers, Swiss system, Swiss modified, single, double, round robin, etc.
So, there you have it folks. Lots of good options for coaches and tournament directors. Once again, thank you Lorenzo and Mike for providing this information to me.