Thanks for you help.

[Gary Hotchkiss(Guest)]

Our Round Robin men's bridge has been going for 25 years. Our fixed 3-table schedule shows our six teams playing each other once in five months. The next five months is a repeat of the first five months but with the Host-visitor reversed.

What I am trying to do is to even-out the hosting to where each team is host one month and visitor the following month over the whole 10 month season.

I copied your 6 team balanced table that appears to be a replacement for our first 5 months. I think I can just flip the 2 teams in each match to designate the second team as the host in their second match.

[Ian Wakeling]

Gary,

Have you taken the "home/away" schedule that the Excel file generates? This will give you the best possible balance of host and visitor across 5 months.  It should look something like the schedule below where blue would mean host and red would mean visitor.

Team M1 M2 M3 M4 M5
 A   B  C  D  E  F
 B   A  D  F  C  E
 C   F  A  E  B  D
 D   E  B  A  F  C
 E   D  F  C  A  B
 F   C  E  B  D  A

each column is a month and each row lists the opponents that a team meets overs the 5 month period.  If you experiment with the Excel file a little, you should soon discover that you could have a much better pattern of host/visitor if there were an odd number of teams and where each month one team has a bye.

Hope that helps,

Ian.

PS Your message was moved as replies to posts in the guest book are not possible.