Tournament for 5 teams
I seem to remember seeing that the Garden Cities would happen the year.
(Though it seems to have disappeared in the new look website)
Within the County it never attracts many applications, but a few Clubs can muster a competitive team.
This year there seem to be five: which is an awful number!
We like to play reasonably long matches, with all the combinations of pairings.
So playing over three sessions would be ideal.
Difficult to fit in anymore matches before the GC closing date.
Four teams and we could play a three round Round-Robin.
Six, and a three round Swiss.
But five!
The Round-Robin becomes five rounds.
The Swiss seems unjust, three teams play twice, two three times.
I tried to dream up a sort of one&half elimination KO!
That would determine who plays twice and who three times; but who sits out first?
Any suggestions?
Comments
Split it into a bunch of mini-matches and get the teams to arrange them privately?
Recruit a team of robots to make for a more manageable six-team format - can this be done? (Obviously the robots would not go forward to represent the county, tough luck boys) - alternatively, try and get a dummy team of more or less equivalent standard together from another county to make up the numbers, with the same proviso?
Otherwise the round robin seems the least bad option.
There is an American Whist movement, where you have 5 sets of boards in play, the people move 2 tables up and the cards 1 table up...
Depending on how many boards you want to play in the session, those sets could be however many boards you like...
Once you have completed this Whist movement session, you lose the lowest scoring team... You then have 4 teams and can play a knock-out semi-final and then the final.
To make it more worthwhile for the lowest scoring team from the 1st session, you could run a commiseration round robin with the 2 teams knocked out in the semi-finals, again with an American Whist movement so that all teams play at the same time.
It is easy to run in a face-to-face American Whist movement, but I am not sure how you can run that online without a lot of faffing about?