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- The Manager
- The manager had run a variety of tournaments, both small scale and medium scale tournaments (~10 participants and ~35 participants respectively). He is most experienced in running small tournaments, being the go-to guy with his friends for setting up brackets for tournaments that take only a few hours to complete. He has run a handful of medium sized tournaments for larger groups, but is by no means an expert. In the medium sized tournament, the hardest aspect of managing and running the tournament was figuring out the tournament structure and generating the matches. With that many teams, there were many different possible tournament styles: single elimination, double elimination, round-robin, etc. Because of the unusual conditions of the tournament, three-player matches (1v1v1) instead of two-player matches (1v1), he decided that the simplest, yet still fair, tournament structure was a round-robin tournament with one player having a bye to the second round. At each stage of the tournament he had to manually generate the next set of round robin matches. The small scale tournament was a simpler, single-elimination bracket. This smaller tournament was much more well defined and as a result much easier to maintain. Using a simple whiteboard, players would just write down the winner of each match after it was played.
- Lessons Learned:
- Generation of a bracket is often difficult without prior knowledge
- Tedious to have to generate all next set of rounds for large numbers of participants (especially in round robin tournaments)
- Updating winners/scores easy under certain conditions (small scale tournament with few participants and on a small time scale)
- Running a longer tournament single-handed takes a lot of time
- Different set of difficulties in running small and large tournaments.
- The Player
- The player is always up for a tournament among friends. Whether it is ping-pong or pool, the player is ready to show off his skills and hopes to end up the winner. He travels in different circles, spending his free time between his co-workers, college friends, and dance buddies, which sometimes results in participating in multiple tournaments at once. He needs to keep track of his scores, report them to his friend in charge, and find out who his next opponent is, but this can get confusing at times. Being a busy guy in multiple tournaments means having to remember multiple sets of scores and names all while trusting that his friend in change charge will spot any score discrepancies and constantly update him on the tournament status.
- Lessons Learned:
- Needs a way to keep track of different tournaments
- Wants to be able to easily view his record
- Would rather not have to rely on word-of-mouth conversations, emails, and text-messages for updates (which sometimes get lost in his memory/inbox)
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