Golf pairings for professional tournaments such as the Masters, as opposed to local club tournaments and leagues, serve very different needs, but have some similarities. For the first two rounds of the Masters, for instance, it is totally up to the powers-that-be to pair the golfers. They may take into consideration the television audience, crowd control, the golfers’ star power. The last two rounds, of course, are based on scores from the first two rounds.
With club tournaments, of course, there are no likely concerns about television, crowds, star power, etc. In a multi-round tournament, previous round scores may come into play for later-round pairings. A common concern for club level leagues and tournaments is to make sure golfers play with as many different players as possible. For a group taking a golf trip, they typically want to make sure everyone plays with everyone else. Depending on the number of players and the number of rounds to be played, trying to make sure everyone plays with everyone else with a minimum of repeats can send smoke rising out of the best of computers. For a mere human brain attempting to arrange or pair the players, the result can be lots of hair pulling.
Luckily there are solutions for both planning tournament pairings and creating the pairings for a golf league. In a tournament the goal might be to make sure that different players are placed into foursomes over a course of a number of round. In a league the goal would be to make sure individuals or teams are matched against different opponents for each weekly event as much as possible. The ideal – never playing the same person or team – is, of course, sometimes not achievable. It’s a mathematical problem for which the ideal solution depends on the number of individuals or teams as well as the number of events.
Our League Manager and Tournament Manager have a very similar “engine” for creating unique pairings (where mathematically possible). The following is a screenshot of the feature of the programs. In the example there are 24 teams (could be players) and 23 events. Teams are numbered horizontally at the top as well as vertically at the left. The black boxes indicate that the team (or player) cannot play against itself.
