Six matches of 2 foursomes for golf holiday

[A.E. Santiago(Guest)]

I am setting up a golf holiday with 8 players (2 foursomes) playing 6 matches.

I want each player to have a different partner each match and to have the foursomes arranged in such a way that each player plays with the other players a similar number of times.

For example: player 1 and player 2 don't play in the same foursome 6 times.  

Can you help?

Saturday, January 24 2004, 12:24 pm
Princeton

[golfer]

I do not see that there was an answer to this question. Does one exist?

[Ian Wakeling]

If the question is: "Can the schedule be arranged so that no two players play together more than once within a foursome?", then the answer is no.  

There is this schedule for 7 rounds where all possible pairs of players occur together in exactly 3 of the foursomes.  This would be a good starting point as you could simply remove the last round.  Then player pairs occuring in the last round would be the ones that only play together twice.

I am not sure exactly what you want here, when you say "each player to have a different partner each match", do you mean that the 4 players in each foursome are playing as two teams of two.  If this is the case, the situation is very much like a Whist tournament, so check out the information on Richard's web pages by following the "learn more" or "schedules" links above.