Tournament Management

TOURNAMENT MANAGEMENT SOFTWARE

League Watch is software for managing tournaments in various sports and different competition formats. League Watch has been developed by the makers of Swiss Perfect and has all the best features of its predecessor as well as completetely new, rich functionality.

Among other features, League Watch supports multiple sports, different event formats, complex tournament structures (multiple sections and play systems), team and individual competitions. It can read and convert Swiss Perfect 97/98 tournaments.

Tournament types

Structure
Tournaments can be divided into any number of sections. Participants are stored in the tournament start list from which then can be copied (or drag and dropped) into particular section's list. Same participants can play in any number of of sections.
An example of a very complex tournament structure supported by League Watch is the World Cup in Football (Soccer). Each of the dozens of preliminary groups, elimination pools in the finals as well as the final 16-team knock-out stage would all be represented as sections in League Watch.

Individual Events
Individual participants (players) are grouped in 1 or more sections.

Team Events
Teams are grouped in 1 or more sections. Depending on the sport, the results are either entered at the team level or are derived from the individual scores.

Systems of play

Knock-out (elimination)
This system is used to rapidly find the best player in a large pool of participants. This is achieved by eliminating losers of each match from the tournament.
The Grand Slam tennis tournaments use a 7-round knock-out system with 128 players participating.

Multi-Round Round-Robin
The same as round-robin except that everyone plays everyone more than once. For example, in a double round-robin, the same two players will play each other twice with the reversed home venue. Examples of double round round-robin tournaments include the major European Fotball Leagues.

Swiss
A special pairing system suitable for tournaments with a large number of participants without eliminating any players in the process.
It is very popular in chess and other board games.
An example of a Swiss tournament is a FIDE World Championship in chess.

Round-Robin
Every participant plays every other participant. The system requires N-1 rounds of play for N participants. There are a few algorithms available that can be used to generate correct round-robin pairings that, in particular, allow for optimal alternation of home and away games.
Preliminary pools in the Football (Soccer) World Cup are examples of round-robin tournaments.


Views

Cross Table
Shows all results in a single 2-dimensional table where participant names/numbers are shown on horizontal and vertical axis. This view is particularly useful in round-robin tournaments.
A special version of the cross table called progress table is implemented for Swiss tournaments. The progress table shows participants on the vertical axis and round numbers horizontally.

Start List
Displays the list of participants (total or per section), allows sorting by various criteria and multiple selections for copying purposes. Supports drag and drop operations from other participant lists and master lists.

Standings
Shows the accumulated points of the participants. The actual content of this view depends on the sport. In a football tournament, apart from the points it may display goals scored for and aginst each team. In a tennis event it may show sets won and lost. As all other tabular views, the standings view can be sorted by clicking on column headers. For example, in a football tournament, you can order the view by a number of goals conceded in away matches, if you choose so.

Round Results
Displays pairings and results. This view can sorted by round (default), date or any column shown. Pairs (matches) can be added by dragging and dropping participants from the Start List view.