A new tournament format, Swiss: a fixed number of rounds, nobody knocked out, every round pairing players with the same record. And a new way to start a night: the draw is rebuilt around picking a format, with a card for each one that tells you what it means for tonight’s players before you draw.
Round Robin gets a double round robin for small groups, and the lanes in Match Controls stop moving about.
Pick a Format
Before the draw, Match Controls now shows a card for every format, each with a small pictogram of its shape:
What it means tonight: “16-player bracket · 4 byes”, “Cup of 16 · Plate of 8”, “3 groups of 4”, “4 rounds, then the top 4”.
Pick one and it opens below: how it works, the player range, roughly how many matches tonight and how many each player gets, and its options. One Draw button draws it.
It opens on the format of your last tournament, the club’s habit.
Options at the draw: Round Robin’s structure and how players reach the A cup, Swiss’s rounds and finish, for that night only. Global Settings decide how they start.
Formats you don’t offer stay on the screen, greyed out, so you can see what exists. One that doesn’t fit tonight’s field can still be picked and says why.
Cup and Plate is now a format of its own, on its own card and in Formats to offer.
Settings for this tournament show the picked format’s match lengths.
Swiss
A fixed number of rounds, and nobody is knocked out: by players (4 rounds for 9–16, 5 for 17–32) or a number you choose.
Every round pairs players with the same record who haven’t met: the table in order, 1st against 2nd, 3rd against 4th, never a rematch when there’s another way. Round 1 is random, or with seeding the top half against the bottom half.
Odd numbers: one player sits out each round, never the same player twice, and the bye counts as a win.
The table: wins, then opponents’ wins (beating strong players counts for more), then leg difference, then legs won.
The finish: the top four play semifinals (1st against 4th, 2nd against 3rd), a bronze final and a final. Or the table decides.
Rounds draw themselves: when the last result of a round is entered, the next round appears. A wrong result in the round just finished can be undone, taking the next round back with it, as long as nothing in it has started.
On the bracket page, each round is a column of its matches, then the top four. Select a match and both players’ matches across the rounds light up.
In Match Controls, the table sits beside the queue, with the top four marked.
Swiss has its own match lengths and its own panel in Global Settings.
Round Robin
Play each other: Twice. One group can now be a double round robin: when everybody has played everybody once, the return round follows in the same order with the players swapped. Both meetings count in the table.
Fewer, fuller groups: with Top half, the draw makes as few groups as fit. 12 players are now 3 groups of 4 (3 group matches each) instead of 4 groups of 3 (2 each), with the same cups.
Smaller Things
The lanes stay put: Match Controls’ row of lanes lists every lane in its place, the busy ones dimmed, so a lane never moves under the pointer.
The landing page shows the new draw, and Swiss joins Pick Your Format.
Behind the scenes, the Docker images are built with current GitHub Actions.
Migration
No migration required. Fully compatible with all existing tournament data, match history, Analytics and settings. Swiss, the double round robin and the new settings are stored in new fields; tournaments and settings without them work exactly as before. The Offer Play a Plate setting from v5.4.2 is now Cup and Plate in Formats to offer: a setup that had it off keeps Cup and Plate not offered. The export format is unchanged. A Swiss tournament needs v5.4.3 or later to open.
This release moves :latest forward to v5.4.3. Installed Chalker apps refresh automatically on their next online launch.
NewTon DC Tournament Manager v5.4.3 — Swiss Precision.