Here’s the scenario – I had 10 teams coming to a tournament but one has dropped out at short notice. I’m trying to sort out a last minute replacement but might end up running with 9 teams.

We’ve got 2 pitches and time for 17 matches on each – the original format was to split into 2 groups of 5, each playing a round robin (10 games on each pitch) then use that to seed playoffs leading to a final match for each team where they are playing for position (9v10 up to 1v2).

I’d like to do something similar with 9 teams as (I think) it’s always better to have a personal ‘final’ at the end of the day. Oviously it’s not fair to do a 4/5 split for the round robin as the some of the teams would then be less tired for the playoffs.

I’m wondering about doing a partial round robin of the 9 teams (maybe 4 games each) then using that to seed playoffs but want to make sure I’m not skewing the competition. I’m playing around with it in Excel but wondered if the wisdom of STW had any suggestions?

3 pools of three
winners plus best losers are the semi finalists, remainder play off for the B final – two teams with the worst record have to play an extra round to give 4 for the b semis

You don’t say what you’re playing but if something scoring like rugby, then you could do 3×3 round robins, 3 winners go through and then the best loser on points/pd goes as well? Gives you enough time left over for a wooden spoon as well….

Gives you 18 pool matches, 4 finals matches (2 semi’s, final and 3rd/4th) and possibly 4 wooden spoon matches. Rest of the time can go toward longer games/longer rests.

Although that does leave 1 team out of any extra games..

The 3 x 3 is good in theory but falls down in practice as you either end up having teams playing back to back matches or a pitch standing empty for a while, neither of which will go down to well.