Euchre Tourney - RANDOM number of players

[carrth]

I'm trying to write some javascript code to programmatically generate partner and table assignments for a progressive euchre tournament. The problem is that I'm not sure how many people will be attending so I want the program to be flexible and accomplish the following tasks:

• Accomodate any number of players (likely somewhere between 20 and 50)
• Randomly assign each player a different partner for every round
• Never assign a player the same partner twice (for instance, if Player2 has Player1 as her partner the first round, they should not be partnered up in any subsequent round)
• If the number of players isn't divisible by 4, that means some people will be sitting out each round. If this is the case, the program will need to make sure that everyone sits out the same number of rounds.

At first, this sounded like an easy program to write but I'm having quite a struggle with it. I've gone about it many different ways but am back at square one now and the tournament is this Friday! At this point, I'm going to have to go the old fashioned way and just assign partners by having them pick numbered pieces of paper out of a hat each round.

Am I over-complicating this? Does anyone have ideas or code examples I could use to get this done?

Thanks in advance!!!

[Ian Wakeling]

Unfortunately I don't have any code (javascript or otherwise) that I can offer you.

Regarding the 4th point, in many cases you will find that you can't balance the number of times people sit out.  Say you have 35 players, so 8 tables of 4 and 3 byes per round.  Since 35 is not divisible by 3, you would need to play 35 rounds before you can have balanced byes.

I am not sure how many rounds you plan, but for multiples of 4 you might find the file that I link to here called Foursome-Tournaments-v4 useful.  Just ignore the A vs B stuff and when 4 people meet assign them to partners and opponents at random.  It doesn't matter how you do this as no two people meet more than once, so all partners and opponents will be different.

For 20, 24, 28 and 32, you will get more rounds if you use the foursome golf schedules here in a similar way.