18 Teams, 6 courts, 8 rounds

[jtbmoose]

We are running an 18 team round robin Pickleball Mixer on 6 courts. Given time constraints, we plan to run 8 rounds. Just looking for an approximate balanced schedule where teams have roughly the same number of byes. Thanks for any help you may provide.

[wbport]

You might want to run a swiss system tournament. Use index cards to list a team, opponent, score this round, and cumulative score. It's random for the first round unless teams have some rank or seeding. For following rounds, make stacks of teams with similar cumulative scores and pair them unless they have already played. Continue for 8 rounds.

Swiss system is used often in chess tournaments if you want to search further or buy software to pair and help run the tournament.

[Ian Wakeling]

Here is a solution if you just want a way of playing 48 different games and you are not worried about ranks.  It's easier to design the schedule for 9 rounds as then it can be arranged so that every team gets exactly 6 games and 3 byes. For example:

  (12  4)  (2 14)  (9 18)  (8  6) (16  5) (17 10)  [1  7 15 13 11  3]
  (13  5)  (3 15)  (1 10)  (9  7) (17  6) (18 11)  [2  8 16 14 12  4]
  (14  6)  (4 16)  (2 11)  (1  8) (18  7) (10 12)  [3  9 17 15 13  5]
  (15  7)  (5 17)  (3 12)  (2  9) (10  8) (11 13)  [4  1 18 16 14  6]
  (16  8)  (6 18)  (4 13)  (3  1) (11  9) (12 14)  [5  2 10 17 15  7]
  (17  9)  (7 10)  (5 14)  (4  2) (12  1) (13 15)  [6  3 11 18 16  8]
  (18  1)  (8 11)  (6 15)  (5  3) (13  2) (14 16)  [7  4 12 10 17  9]
  (10  2)  (9 12)  (7 16)  (6  4) (14  3) (15 17)  [8  5 13 11 18  1]
  (11  3)  (1 13)  (8 17)  (7  5) (15  4) (16 18)  [9  6 14 12 10  2]

where the square brackets have the 6 teams with a bye in each round.  If you can only play 8 rounds then leave out round 9 and the 6 teams in the square bracket will be the ones who have 6 games, everyone else will have 5 games - which is as balanced as it can be.

[jtbmoose]

Thanks, Ian! We will make the 9 rounds work.