Creating a Knock-out Tournament
When creation a Competition, a Competition Format is selected: choose ‘Knockout’.
After saving (publishing) the Competition, additional Knock-out tournament specific (competition) data can be entered, as is highlighted below.
- Scheme size
The (maximum) number of Competitors in this Competition. Possible values are: 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, and 128.
After saving this Knock-out tournament specific data parameter, the ‘Scheme size’ parameter cannot be updated anymore.
The rationale is that (many) Competitors and Matches have been automatically created based on these parameters. (If you want to redefine these parameters anyway, it is recommended to delete the Competitors and Matches for this Knock-out tournament first, select Competition Format “none”, save and select the Knock-out format again.) Notice that the Competition Group parameter can still be updated.
Update the Competitors and Matches to complete your Knock-out tournament. (See also the section on “Byes in Match results” below.)
Knock-out tournament specific Match data
When updating a Match in your Competition, there are two fields that are specific to a Knock-out tournament.
At creation of your Competition, each Match has a number that is automatically assigned to it. In addition, each Match indicates what the next Match of the winner is (this is a WordPress post ID).
You can change these to Knock-out tournament specific fields, but it is strongly recommended not to do this. (Unless you are absolutely sure what you are doing. Yes, this is a warning: it can mess up your Matches!)
Byes in Match results
Assuming you have a Competition of size 8 and only 6 Competitors. This is a common situation in Knock-out tournaments: there are less than the maximum number of Competitors. The ‘missing’ Competitors are called ‘bye’.
When you setup your Competition, you edit each Match in the first round where one of the Competitors is missing:
- select ‘unknown’ for the missing Competitor
- fill out ‘bye’ for the Match result
When saving the Match, the actual Competitor (in this example, John Doe) is automatically forwarded to the next round of your Knock-out tournament.