I am planning a cutthroat billiards tournament, but cannot find a bracket suitable for the event. Our tournament will be once a week for 6 weeks. Also, we don't always have the same number of people each week. Does anyone have an idea?
The easiest way to figure out a bracket is to use a 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, or 64 player format. Say you had 6 players. You would use an 8-player bracket. This means you would have 2 byes. Draw out 8 lines on a sheet of paper. Write the word bye on the first line and the 8th line. Put the names of the players in a hat, on 6 pieces of paper. From top to bottom, from line 2 to line 7, draw a name and put it on line 2. Continue to do this until all 6 names are drawn. The first game, in the first round, is between the player on line 2 and the bye on line 1. Since the first game was a bye, advance the player on line 2 to the 2nd round. Next, the player on line 3 plays the player on line 4, with the winner advancing to play the player on line 2 who got a first round bye. Line 5 plays line 6, line 7 has the bye on line 8, so they automatically advance to the second round. In the second round, the line 1-2 winner plays the line 3-4 winner, the line 5-6 winner plays the line 7-8 winner. You should have 4 players left on 4 lines, for round 3. The first 2 players play each other and the bottom 2 play each other. After the third round is played, it's time for the final between the last 2 remaining players. Now say you have 12 players. You would use the 16-player format, you just have to put 2 byes at the top half of the bracket (lines 1 3), and 2 byes at the bottom half (lines 14 16). This will give you 1 more round than an 8-player format. If you end up with an odd number of players, just put 1 more bye on the top half of the bracket. If you have any problems just e-mail me. Good Luck!
Just make your own bracket with exponents of 3. It would go like this: .1 .2---------------------2-------- .3----3----33----3----3 444.444.444.444.444.444.444.444. The problem with having a tournament for a game with 3 players is that you cannot have a game with only two players mixed in, so the number of players always must be divisible by 3. So you HAVE to have 12, 15, 18, 21, 24, 27, etc number of players, and any extra must sit out. It's kind of a silly game to use for a tournament because of this, and the fact that the game is easy for good players (break and runs are super easy, second runs are even easier), and people will claim they got cheated because they never even got to shoot. BTW, like all brackets, if you use the one above and don't have 27 players, you just make one game a bye. Just make sure if there are more than one bye that you evenly distribute them among all of the brackets. EDIT: Craig, Cutthroat is a 3 player game, you can't use traditional brackets.
