How do you keep your brackets?

skaforhire Monday, 2/28/2011

Hello all,

At risk of overstaying my welcome here, I have another thread topic that I would like to get some input on.


When your club, league, family, or just self run a tournament / race, how do you do your brackets? What is the most popular type? (IE: double elimination, single elimination, 4 at a time, etc...)

Do you use any programs to keep track of your brackets?

To start this off, we normally run a double elimination bracket from 32 - 128 cars. No player starts against their own car (we allow multiple entries). Up until last Christmas we tallied our brackets by hand, with printed excel brackets. To speed things up I bought a copy of Tourney Master 3. Which is OK, but since it really was not designed for racing or even really too many stat categories, nor does it really have a good database that remembers cars for reuse - it only speeds up the racing portion and not the stat keeping. Although, I know that not many groups keep stats (races ran and won is our most important stat). We run 6 different events at some get-togethers, so the bracket software does speed it up after everyone is registered. I am always looking for something better to keep brackets on though.


Discussion

For my personal racing, I create blank brackets in Excel as we pick out 32 cars to race. Each boy picks out 11 and I pick 10 cars I want to race. We just pick the cars as we want to race them and its the best 2 out of 3. The top 4 are garaged until we have a group of 40. Then we have all of the 4th place finishers racing against each other with the top cars moving onto the 3rd placers finish. The top cars from that bracket then move into the 2nd place finishers. Once we have the top 16 cars, we then do a best 3 out of 5 until there is one car standing.

I rank the cars based on a ranking system that was kind of inspired by Redline Derby Racing, but a little more simplified based on their wins and losses and who the losses were against. If that car made it to the final 4, then they don't lose as many points as a normal loss.

I manually plug each race back into Excel to update the overall rankings for each car with their wins/losses and who they ran up against with pictures of the cars.

In my competitive racing league that I don't run there is no tracking at all except to make sure a person who entered the car does not race against another car they entered in that division. This is a 4 lane race track. However, you can only have one car in the final 4 race. If you have multiple cars at that point, all of your cars race against each other until you only have one car moving into the final race.

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Jobe 3/1/11

At my races I run single elimination with hand written brackets.
I have a 16 car bracket drawn in CAD that I print out and take to the races.
Each person is allowed to enter two cars, I make sure they don't race each other in the first or second round if possible.
I run best 2 out of 3 with the third try getting lane choice by flip of coin or ladies choice .

I would like to try a double elimination sometime, but I usually don't have time or the interest at my night time events.

I don't have that many entries into the Mail-in event so I think I'll try a double elimination that way I get a true first, second , third.

b

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GrabberGT 3/1/11

[quote="Jobe"]At my races I run single elimination with hand written brackets.
I have a 16 car bracket drawn in CAD that I print out and take to the races.

I currently use and excel version of this:
http://www.printyourbrackets.com/8teamd ... ation.html

Nothing too fancy with tracking but it works for family fun. I am interested in software to help track stats and such much like is used on this fantasy league.

I do best 2 out of 3 per race to get the best possible outcome from each car.

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redlinederby 3/1/11
Site manager

My brackets you can see in the Fantasy League. Single elim with 16 cars.

To handle it all, however, I made my own web app that pulls the entered cars (or random cars) and then lets me sort them in a few different ways. Then there's a page that I use to fill in the brackets (it's actually the same interface players use to pick their brackets).

Here's a screen cap of what I use to seed and arrange each tournament.
Diecast Cars, Hot Wheels, Matchbox

I've thought about making a public web app for managing brackets that will keep stats and stuff, primarily aimed at us diecast racers. It sounds like there would be some interest in such a thing so I may explore idea that again. Although once you start talking about double elimination and stuff like that, it complicates things to the Nth degree.

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