Tournament formats, and when to pick each one
Pick the format from what you owe the field, not from what is familiar. A knockout sends half the entry home after one match and is the cheapest thing you can run; a round robin guarantees everybody a full afternoon and costs four times the court time. Everything else is an attempt to buy some of the second with some of the first.
Nine shapes, what each costs in matches and time, and which bodies sanction which.
The knockout, and what it costs a field
A single knockout of N entrants plays exactly N minus one matches, because every match eliminates one entrant and all but the champion must be eliminated. Thirty-two entrants is thirty-one matches in five rounds. Nothing else is as cheap.
The price is paid by the field rather than by the organiser. Half of everybody who turned up plays one match and goes home, and in a club event where people drove twenty minutes and paid an entry fee, that is a real cost even though it does not appear on any budget.
Use it when the field is large and the day is short, when the point of the event is to produce a champion rather than to give everybody a game, or when you have fewer courts than a bigger format would need. Use something else when people came to play.
Formats where everybody plays more than once
A round robin plays every pairing: N entrants is N times N minus one over two matches, so eight entrants play twenty-eight and sixteen play a hundred and twenty. Everybody gets the same number of matches, the table is unarguable, and the court time grows with the square of the field. It is the right answer for eight and the wrong one for thirty-two.
A group stage into a knockout is the compromise almost every federation actually runs, and it is the only shape all seven sports on SetMatcher sanction. Four groups of four is twenty-four group matches plus a knockout of eight, so every entrant is guaranteed three matches and the whole thing still finishes in a day.
A single round is the smallest of the formats and the one people forget: one round of matches, no progression, everybody plays once. It is what a club social evening actually is, and calling it a tournament with one round is more honest than pretending an eight-player draw with three rounds fits into two hours.
Formats where nobody goes home early
A full-placement play-out, called a Monrad in squash and Australian tennis, plays for every position from first to last: nobody is eliminated, every round pairs entrants who are still level with each other, and the table it ends in is a finishing order rather than a group table. It is the only shape a governing body actually mandates, and the World Squash Federation mandates it for individual championships.
A consolation draw, the plate, is a second smaller board for the entrants who lose their first match. It is built by the reverse-mirror method that the World Squash Federation and the European Padel Federation both publish, and it is called a plate in squash, a bonus draw by the ITF and a consolation bracket in pickleball. Badminton forbids it outright: BWF general competition regulation 15.4 says a player losing a match shall not play again in the same event.
Two more sit above the plate. A feed-in consolation takes the losers of every main-draw round before the semi-finals, each joining at the round matching where they fell out, so its winner finishes fifth: the USTA publishes it as the Feed-In Championship, and tennis and squash are the only two sports that run it. And the compass draw sends the losers of each round to a board of their own at another point of the compass; it is a tennis format, the USTA is the only body that fully specifies it, and it is best drawn at sixteen, thirty-two or sixty-four entries because byes complicate it badly.
Picking one, in four sentences
Start from three numbers: how many entrants, how many courts, and how many hours. The format is usually decided by those before anybody has an opinion about it, and the page on how many courts a draw needs works the arithmetic out in full.
Then check what your sport allows. SetMatcher holds nine shapes and each sport declares which of them it sanctions, because a shape that is ordinary in one sport is forbidden in another: a plate is routine in tennis and against the rules in badminton, and double elimination is sanctioned in pickleball alone.
- Few courts, many entrants, one afternoon: a single knockout, or a knockout with a plate if you can spare the court time.
- Eight or fewer entrants and a whole day: a round robin, and let the table decide it.
- Twelve to thirty-two entrants and a full day: groups into a knockout, which guarantees three matches and is sanctioned in every sport here.
- A championship where the finishing order matters all the way down: a full-placement play-out, which is what the squash world does.
Where to read next
More on the subjects you have just read about.
Your first match is one tap away.
Free for players. Clubs get a register, a park map, court bookings and lessons.