Hi - Having started a few tournaments I could not find out much very about the various systems that organisers use to set up and manage their tournaments.
Therefore I thought I'd make a few notes which may be helpful (or not) for others - and would also encourage responses from guys with far more experience and knowledge.
Having done that I wondered if this or another thread would be the forum - obviously I would be happy to assist in the handbook, but it may be that a separate thread to allow additional comments and suggestions may be better?
The following is a few notes I drafted so far:-
Managing Tournaments – Excel Macros
As someone new to setting up tournaments, I thought that it might be useful to publish some of the techniques I have found to manage the publication of setting them up and keeping them updated. Of course I know I am reinventing the wheel, as many of you have been setting up and running tournaments for years, so any and all comments and suggestions in this forum that I can also learn from would hopefully encourage others to set up a their own tournaments and possibly spark ideas for new tournaments.
I use Excel for keeping track of games, but my first challenge was getting to grips with the CC coding. The [Official] Conquer Club Tournament Handbook is an excellent guide and you can use the coding directly or, as I do, via macros in Excel.
For instance, game invitations appear as “View Game 8918488 (Auto-Join Game)” for which the coding is “View
Game 1234567 (
Auto-Join Game)” where 1234567 is the game number and Password is the password.
In Excel, the coding to get this is:
="[to]"&A12&" "&B$4&"[/to]" where A12 holds the game number and B4 the password. In this way you can keep lists of the opponents and game numbers and a list of the coding which can then be copied and pasted into pm’s to the various contestants. This makes multiple invitations by pm far easier!
In the game thread, I write it so that the game information appears as “Game 1234567 Dave vs DaveH” and, when the game is over, the result is shown as “Game 1234567 Dave vs DaveH (or with the first player’s name crossed out of course!).
In CC coding this is
Game 8918488 Dave vs DaveH and then
Game 8918488 Dave vs
DaveH (or
Game 8918488 Dave vs DaveH depending on the result)
Arranged in Excel such as:
A B C D E
1 Player 1 Player 2 Game Number Winner
2 Dave DaveH 1234567
The conditional statement in Excel that is copied to 2E is then:
=IF(D2="","[game]"&C2&"[/game] "&A2&" vs "&B2,IF(D2=A2, "[game]"&C2&"[/game] "&A2&" vs
"&B2&"", "[game]"&C2&"[/game]
"&A2&" vs "&B2))
This allows a complete list of results to be quickly copied and pasted into the main thread.
However I’m sure you experienced guys out there have far better systems!