Okay, so today I wanted to mess around with scheduling a double round-robin tournament for six teams. You know, the kind where everyone plays everyone else twice. I’ve always been curious about how these things are organized, and today was the day I decided to figure it out.
First off, I had to wrap my head around what a double round-robin actually means. It’s simple enough, every team plays every other team twice, once at home and once away, I guess. This is different from a single round-robin where they only play once. Since I had six teams, I called them Team 1, Team 2, Team 3, and so on, up to Team 6. Easy peasy.
Then came the fun part – figuring out the schedule. I learned that there’s a neat little formula to calculate the total number of games: N(N-1), where N is the number of teams. So, for my six teams, it was 6x(6-1) = 30 games in total. That’s a lot of games!
I stumbled upon some info saying that a six-team round-robin is usually spread out over two days. The first day would have four rounds, and the second day would start with the fifth round. Since I was doing a double, I figured I’d just repeat this twice.
Now, to actually schedule the games, I decided to go old school. I grabbed a pen and paper and started drawing up tables. For the first day, I had to make sure no team played twice in the same round. Here’s what I came up with:
- Round 1:
- Team 1 vs Team 4
- Team 2 vs Team 5
- Team 3 vs Team 6
- Round 2:
- Team 1 vs Team 5
- Team 2 vs Team 6
- Team 3 vs Team 4
- Round 3:
- Team 1 vs Team 6
- Team 2 vs Team 4
- Team 3 vs Team 5
- Round 4:
- Team 1 vs Team 2
- Team 3 vs Team 5
- Team 4 vs Team 6
For the fifth round, which would be on the second day, I had:
- Round 5:
- Team 1 vs Team 3
- Team 2 vs Team 6
- Team 4 vs Team 5
I then basically repeated this whole sequence to complete the “double” part of the double round-robin. It took a bit of time to make sure I didn’t mess up and have teams playing each other more than twice or not at all, but I finally got it.
It was actually pretty satisfying to see it all laid out. I felt like a real tournament organizer, even though it was just a little experiment. Plus, I now have a much better appreciation for the people who plan these events for real.
So, that was my little adventure in tournament scheduling. It wasn’t as straightforward as I thought it would be, but it was definitely a fun and educational experience. If you ever find yourself needing to schedule a round-robin tournament, hopefully, my little journey here can give you a head start. Just remember that formula: N(N-1) for the total number of games in a double round-robin. Trust me, it helps a lot!
