How To Run A Tournament On Time

There’s been a lot of talk lately about what we as the fencing community can do to better support women and gender minorities specifically. As my friend Illadore pointed out, the absolute lowest hanging fruit we need to start with is running things on time. If you have any other responsibilities at an event besides competing, not knowing when things are going to end is an absolute nightmare. Is there a workshop you wanted to take? Is it your turn to watch the kid? Did you sign up to help out with something? Is there literally anything you’re responsible for today besides yourself? All of these become incredibly difficult if the schedule that day is just, “Show up and hope for the best”.

In a comment thread this morning someone said that there’s no way to know how long any tournament will take. As someone with the experience of having run tournaments for almost as many years as I have fingers, I would beg to differ. It’s been seven, maybe even eight years since I had a tournament I was running go late. So here’s my handy guide as to how to make everyone’s lives better when it comes to running things at events. As a note, this is all aimed at SCA tournaments as that’s the space where I have been in charge of things. However, I’m sure that a lot of this can apply to HEMA or any other space that regularly holds competitions.

1. Is this a one day event? If so, have your first tournament start at 11AM. No one is ever going to go to your 9AM tournament. 10AM tournaments are a great notion, but people are slow AF and that's going to push your start time back 20-30 minutes.

2. If you're really committed to doing a 10AM, do not have it be the A Game Tournament of the day. People need time to warm-up and get their authorizations in. No one wants to feel rushed when it comes to the main event that day.

3. Are you a sitting royal? Then don't hold a field court that interrupts a tournament. It kills any warm up people have gone through, none of us know how long you're about to take, and more people are going to be annoyed at you than not. The only exception to this is that if you plan the court out before hand and tell the MIC (well before day of) so that they can schedule their tournament to start 30 minutes later. Having smaller courts throughout the day is fine, but doing them as a surprise to your event staff just throws a wrench in everything.

4. Are you a sitting royal at a major inter-kingdom event like Pennsic or Gulf Wars then DON'T FUCKING HOLD AN ELEVATION AT THE START TIME FOR THE TOURNAMENT. Looking at you Ansteorra. Every single person there who isn't from your kingdom hates you now. ARE YOU SERIOUSLY FUCKING CONSIDERING HOLDING AN HOUR LONG COURT RIGHT BEFORE CHAMPS? Looking at you East Kingdom. Now not only does everyone hate you, but all of your allies are now currently in talks with the other side asking how easier it would be to defect because screw you.

5. Stop trying to cram a gajillion things into one day. People like pickups. You should have at max 2-3 slots for tournaments/melees in one day. I guarantee you that no one is going to bemoan the lack of a fourth thing, but they will be disappointed that they didn't get to cross swords with that one friend they drove out five hours to see.

Alright, now we're going to break down tournaments by type and how long you need for each.

POOLED ROUND ROBIN

Eight person pools breaking to a sweet sixteen double elimination? You need two full hours. If you don't have the space to run all of the initial pools at once, add half an hour.

The really important thing here isn't actually the number of entrants or doing it as one pass vs best two out of three. The important thing is how many people you have per pool. Adding one person to a pool doesn't just add a couple more fights, mathematically it adds a whole ton. The magic number here is really just 8 people per pool. Are you running a small tournament that only has ten people? Great, split them into two pools.

SWISS SYSTEM

This format has a bunch of names in the SCA, but every other form of competition just calls it a Swiss system, so that's what I'm using here. I've also seen Bedford Points or Progressive Points used to describe the same thing, but I'm going for consistency here.

Are you doing five rounds for best of five? Hour and a half. What about ten rounds breaking to semifinals where it's five passes to first blood? Three hours, split over lunch.

BEAR PITS

Also known as King of the Hill. These can take however long you feel like (please give it at least an hour and a half). The real trick here is that you need more lists than you think running at once. Like with a pooled round robin, you really want one list for every eight fighters. At a minimum people should be splitting their time 50/50 between fighting and waiting in line. If you have to sit in line five times as long as you're out there fighting (with the exception of people who are just one-shotting folks), the tournament is no longer fun. There's a reason Disney World has folks entertaining you while you stand in line.

DOUBLE ELIM

Ironically, this is the hardest one to time. As long as you shotgun this, as opposed to having each pair go one at a time, you should be able to get this done in an hour if you have less than 20 people. Once you break twenty, just give it two hours just in case. If this is an 80+ double elim at Pennsic, just go ahead and give it three hours. It's not going to take the whole time, but as we say in the business world "Under-promise and over-deliver".

SINGLE ELIM

As long as you shotgun this (have everyone fight at once), this is the only format you can get done in under an hour at an event. If you really feel like running a 10AM tournament, this is your best bet.

MISCELLANEOUS TOURNAMENT THOUGHTS

1. If your tournament requires people to go through multiple styles (single, longsword, sword & cloak, etc.), give yourself an extra 30 minutes for everyone to get through all those authorizations they've been putting off. Doing things besides just min/maxing for rapier and dagger is in line with period fencing and is also just a nice way to change things up. The SCA just loves paperwork. Note, there are some kingdoms who just do one big auth, so those folks are free to skip this step.

2. You're going to want a second list. The thing that got me in trouble early on was thinking "Oh, we don't have that many people, we only need one marshal to run the whole thing". I would then find myself suddenly trying to make three lists happen in the last fifteen minutes. Learn from my mistakes and start people off with more lists to fight in. No, I don't care how small your kingdom is. Looking at you Calontir. Once you get past eight people you need a second list, even if it's all just one pool.

3. Line your staff up beforehand. People in the SCA love helping out, but they love being asked to help out even more. Don't wait for people to have pity on you halfway through and come in to bail you out. Most of us are marshals, so it's fine if you just ask folks to marshal their own pools. Once you hit about twenty people, though, you're going to want a second person running your list table. That's a job that can't really be done by someone who's also competing, so plan ahead because otherwise someone is going to have to give up their fun in order to bail you out.

4. Put it all on the website and then don't change when it ends. It's actually fine if your tournament starts late, it just matters if it ends on time. If the website says 2PM, though, and you decide to start at 1, no one will like you and you won't get any sprinkles.

5. Have a big announcement for "This is the finals!" People don't want to miss their friend's big day where no one was betting on them and then suddenly they're one of the last two. If the tournament just peters out with no fanfare, no one is going to pay attention. If you aren't great at projecting, find someone who is to say it real loud. They don't even have to be on staff for that day, they just need to say one to two sentences so that everyone can hear. Relatedly, announce the winner right there. You can wait until court to hand out prizes, but people want to know if they did well and more importantly if they need to stay on site for court.

For more of my thoughts on swordplay, please feel free to pick up a copy of my book over at FoolOfSwords.com

Photo credit: Rachel Kerner

This photo is actually from a ten round, five weapon style, Swiss system tournament I ran this past winter that started 20+ minutes late and still ended well before the time allotted.