Pickleball weighted round-robin

[mh]

Could anyone create a 24-player 4-court round-robin doubles schedule please?

Essential:
- 15-rounds seems about right for time
- Everyone would then play the same amount of matches I think?!
- No player to be off resting more than one round in a row

Ideally:
- The top players nos. 1-8 and the bottom players nos. 17-24 are 'weighted' so they do not play with or against each other at any time. 
- A round relies on as few matches as possible from the previous round to commence. For example, if players 1,2,3,4 were playing on Court 1 in Round 1, then in Round 2 if Player 1 was on Court 1, Player 2 on Court 2 etc. that court could hold up the next round getting started. 

FYI - we tried 2x 12-player schedules last week but players weren't happy if they didn't make the 'top half cut'. If this is possible it would be great as very subtle in sorting players by ability.  

[Ian Wakeling]

I think the weighted thing is probably a bad idea, a player with 10 games is going to have 20 opponents from a pool of 23 but you are saying that 8 of those are off limits for 16 of the players.  If a nice schedule can exist in this scenario, I think it would involve players 9 to 16 having more games than the rest, as they have more possible partners and opponents.  I also don't like your second ideal criterion as this goes against the general mixing of partners and opponents which is something that I think you want.

I can offer the following which I think meets your essential criteria.  The same groups of 8 players have byes in sequence, so the byes are as equally distributed as possible. All the partners are different and most of the opponents are different, except (5,7) and (11,15).  I could make a better schedule if having consecutive byes  was allowed.

( 5  3 v 15 10)  (16  1 v  4 12)  ( 7  9 v  6 14)  ( 8 13 v  2 11)
(24  6 v  3 18)  (19  4 v 23  8)  ( 5 20 v 22 17)  (21  7 v  1  2)
(17 14 v 21 24)  ( 9 20 v 15 18)  (12 22 v 19 11)  (16 23 v 13 10)
( 4 11 v  9  5)  ( 1  6 v  2 15)  (14 13 v  8 10)  (16 12 v  3  7)
( 1  4 v 17 24)  ( 2  5 v 23 18)  (21 20 v  3  8)  ( 6  7 v 22 19)
(19 24 v  9 16)  (22 15 v 23 14)  (18 13 v 12 17)  (20 11 v 10 21)
(13 12 v  6  4)  (14 16 v  5  1)  ( 8  2 v  3  9)  ( 7 15 v 10 11)
( 7  4 v 21 18)  (20  6 v  1 23)  ( 2  3 v 19 17)  (24  8 v 22  5)
(11 24 v 19 15)  (17 18 v 14 10)  (22 20 v 13 16)  (12  9 v 23 21)
( 5 13 v  1  7)  ( 6 16 v 11  8)  ( 2 12 v 15 14)  (10  3 v  4  9)
(20  4 v  2  7)  (24 18 v  8 21)  ( 5 17 v  6 19)  (22 23 v  3  1)
(20 10 v 19 12)  (14 24 v 23 11)  (17 21 v 16 15)  (22 13 v 18  9)
( 7 13 v  5 15)  ( 4  3 v 14 11)  ( 2  6 v 10 16)  (12  1 v  8  9)
(19  3 v  1 18)  (24  5 v  2 20)  (23  7 v 17  8)  ( 6 22 v 21  4)
(15 23 v 16 18)  (11  9 v 20 17)  (22 24 v 10 12)  (21 14 v 13 19)

[mh]

Thanks Ian.

I have come up with this. It doesn't really follow any mathematical logic, created by trial and error.

Essentially the 24 players are divided into 6 per court and play-round robin for 6 rounds. After which they spread out into a 12-player round robin. The exception is players 13,14,15 play in the upper 12 for 1 match, and 10,11 and 12 play down for one match. This gives 3 players the opportunity to play up but also helped in avoiding duplicate partners later on. 

It would be greatly appreciated if you could scan this to ensure: 

• everybody plays the same amount (9 matches), 
• nobody has the same partner twice, 
• nobody sits off more than twice in a row. 

Thanks, Mark

[Ian Wakeling]

Hi Mark,

This almost meets your criteria, there are 3 exceptions to the sitting out - for example player 2 in rounds 8 and 9.  Looking at the schedule it is extremely close to separating players 1 to 12 and 13 to 24 into separate groups which is something I thought you were trying to avoid.  The opponent balance does not look great, for example player 5 & 6 oppose 5 times, while players 5 & 10 never oppose.

Ian