How to run a one-day tournament

Work backwards from when you have to be out

The hall booking is the real constraint, not the format. Take your finish time, subtract the presentation, subtract a buffer of at least half an hour, and that is the tournament.

Then divide: matches available equals hours × courts × slots per hour. At 25 minutes a slot, two courts for five hours is 24 matches. That number decides your format, not the other way round.

Pick a format that guarantees matches

For most one-day tournaments, groups then a playoff. It guarantees every team three matches before anybody is knocked out, parallelises well, and still ends with a final.

Avoid a straight knockout unless the day is genuinely short. Half your entrants having driven over to play once is how you lose them for next year.

If the field is large, Swiss. If it is small and the morning is long, everyone plays everyone.

Build in slack you will need

Something will overrun. A five-set match, a first-aid stop, a team stuck in traffic. If your schedule has no slack, the overrun compounds all day and you finish an hour late.

The usual fix is a scheduled gap in the middle — lunch, or a break between the group stage and the playoff — which absorbs whatever the morning lost. It also gives you the moment to redraw if you have to.

Decide who enters results, before the day

The most common failure is not the format, it is that results pile up on scraps of paper at a desk and the tables are an hour behind by lunchtime. By then nobody knows who is qualifying and the playoff draw is late.

Either one person enters everything from a phone as it comes in, or each court reports to a single point. What does not work is everyone assuming somebody else has it.

Put it on a wall

The single biggest reduction in questions asked of the organiser is a screen showing what is live, the tables and what is on next. Every question somebody does not have to ask you is thirty seconds you get back, and over a day that is most of an hour.

A QR code on the door doing the same job for phones is the second biggest.

The tiebreakers, before you need them

Decide the order — head-to-head or score difference first — and publish it with the fixtures. Deciding it after two teams have finished level is how a tournament ends in an argument, because whichever you pick will look like it was picked to favour somebody.

The last half hour

Have the trophies out and the results checked before the final finishes. The presentation is what people remember and it is invariably rushed, because the final ran over and the caretaker wants the hall.

Common questions