Winboard Forum

I am trying to figure out a way to do a knock-out style tournament in xboard. So far looking though the new options in 4.6, it appears this is not supported. Any ideas?

I'll say, though, that the new tourney manager is a great step in the right direction. I love it already and I haven't even used it yet!

Indeed, the only supported tourney styles are (multi-)gauntlet, round-robin and Swiss. How would a knock-out tourney work, in the face of a draw possibility?

In the case of a dead draw, it could be handled a couple of ways:

1. Replay the whole pairing. i.e. if it were 10 games per pairing, then they must play another 10 games. Repeat until one comes out ahead.
2. Enter sudden death. Play another single game, repeat until there is a win-loss result. This win-loss result determines the result for that pairing.

If you wanted to go off the deep end, many knock-out tournaments are deemed single-elimination or double-elimination, rarely more than double. If this were the desire, it'd mean xboard would have to keep track of multiple 'brackets'. i.e. a winners bracket and a losers bracket. I think this adds an a much greater level of complexity and I'm not sure how many people would really use the feature - besides, they could always mimic a losers bracket by simply playing a second single elimination tournament and exclude the winner of the first tournament. It's not exactly the same, but very similar.

My suggestion would be for a single elimination (knock-out) format with a user defined way of handling draw results (replay pairing or sudden death). I think all the other tournament options would stay the same.