TiebreakerJS - platform independent tournament manager

[JDK]

At our local Legacy playgroup we tend to have around eight to eleven players for tournaments. Each time one of us has to bring a Windows notebook to make the pairings and compute the tiebreakers. Sure, we could do it the hard way, make pairings and calculate tiebreakers by hand, but this is time consuming and annoying to do. Naturally, I figured there has to be an app for that in one of the app stores. Well, there wasn’t a single one specifically for MTG with the ability to compute the usual/official tiebreakers.

So I fired up my text editor and began to code such a program myself.


URL: http://tiebreaker.kraken.at

Features:

player management
pairing system
match reporting & history
tiebreaker calculation
tournament export


TiebreakerJS is designed for small tournaments (4-32 players), but could theoretically handle more than that. The pairing algorithm is still ‘work in progress’ and could mess something up. If you experience strange behavior, please leave a comment and provide detailed information (screenshots are helpful too).

The site should work on any device capable of handling (modern) web technologies like Javascript and HTML5. A current Android device or iPhone does the trick – as well as the respective tablets.

For now, the playerlist gets wiped with every reload, but you can add a parameter to the URL, to automatically add the specified players when loading the page:

http://tiebreaker.kraken.at/?players=Player 1,Player 2,Player 3...
By clicking on "Save Playerlist" the site will show you the URL, so you can save it as a bookmark and have a persistent playerbase.

Screenshots:
http://i.imgur.com/u41a3v1.png http://i.imgur.com/3DXUUHT.png http://i.imgur.com/P9eHBBv.png

Tested on:

Windows 7 (Chrome)
Nexus 5

[Raystar]

Hello mate,

thanks for your efforts. I used the platform yesterday night with some friends (we were playing some kind of sealed deck tournament in a pub :) ) and it worked beautifully.

I'm going to test it again soon when we'll have our next Cube session.

Thanks again and keep up the good work!!

[Jeanval]

Great initiative, can't wait to try this !

[JDK]

Thanks! I implemented some new stuff yesterday and an export/save feature as well as round reviewing are planned for the future/in the works.

[kiblast]

Thanks!

We need a feature to drop players between rounds.

[JDK]

We need a feature to drop players between rounds.

Noted.

[TsumiBand]

Very cool.

Seems to work fine on Safari, if you were wondering. I'll try it on Chrome and Chromium when I get home.

In my experience people like to argue about why/how tiebreakers are decided; I wonder if it would be worthwhile to have an "Explain These Pairings" button in case anyone wants to question the logic.

Requisite request for visible brackets :)

[JDK]

In my experience people like to argue about why/how tiebreakers are decided; I wonder if it would be worthwhile to have an "Explain These Pairings" button in case anyone wants to question the logic.
Tiebreakers have nothing to do with the pairings! Tiebreakers are calculated for the standings only - following the rules stated in the MTG Tournament Rules - Appendix C.

Pairings are done by pairing people together with the same points (from top to bottom), if possible - except for the first round, where pairings are random. If they've played each other already, they are assigned someone else with the same or lower points. This ensures, that people don't play each other twice before having played against anyone else. See it as a tweak for small tournaments.


Requisite request for visible brackets :)
Not sure what you mean by that, sorry. :(

[TsumiBand]

Tiebreakers have nothing to do with the pairings! Tiebreakers are calculated for the standings only - following the rules stated in the MTG Tournament Rules - Appendix C.

Pairings are done by pairing people together with the same points (from top to bottom), if possible - except for the first round, where pairings are random. If they've played each other already, they are assigned someone else with the same or lower points. This ensures, that people don't play each other twice before having played against anyone else. See it as a tweak for small tournaments.


Not sure what you mean by that, sorry. :(

I just realized that maybe that doesn't work unless players are eliminated, so maybe nevermind. I mean one of those pairing trees or whatever they're called.



Player 0 -- 2 --
Player 0 -- 2 --
Player 1 -- 0 -- |
Player 0 -- 2 --
Player 2 -- 0 -- | |
Player 3 -- 0 -- |
Player 3 -- 2 -- |
Player 0 FTW
Player 4 -- 2 -- |
Player 4 -- 2 -- |
Player 5 -- 1 -- | |
Player 4 -- 1 --
Player 6 -- 0 -- |
Player 7 -- 1 --
Player 7 -- 2 --


I don't think you can do that if players are never dropped or considered 'out of the running', so it doesn't really matter. I withdraw my feature request :)

[JDK]

Yeah, swiss system != eliminiation. ^^
Usually a MTG tournament is run in swiss structure with a cutoff to top x (2/4/8), where the eliminiation system is used. In smaller events (more casual), there is no cutoff, so there are just swiss rounds.

Maybe I'll add a feature to support eliminations rounds for the top x.

[TsumiBand]

FWIW I saw no issue on Chrome/Chromium in Linux and you seem to have done well in keeping your inputs fairly safe from low-level douchebags like me trying to break things with semi-colons and alert windows. :D Actually I expected Chromium to suck, because it sucks, but everything was fine.