GameTime Scheduler for Windows Help File
Pair Generation Method
GameTime can generate the pairs for your schedule in a few different ways:
- Standard Table -- This is the method always used in earlier versions of GameTime. When designing GameTime, we established a set of pairings for each number of teams that you have which ensures that each team plays once in each set, and that every team plays every other team once in each round robin.
- Sliding Teams -- This method creates pairings two-sets-at-a-time, and guarantees perfect home/visitor sequencing. That is, for each team, every other game will be Home, and the in-between games will be Visitor. This method is something like this for 6 and 7 teams (for comparison):
Some notes with this pairing method are:6 Teams
Set 1 & 2 Set 3 & 4 Set 5 1 v/s 2 1 v/s 3 1 v/s 4 2 v/s 3 2 v/s 4 2 v/s 5 3 v/s 4 3 v/s 5 3 v/s 6 4 v/s 5 4 v/s 6 5 v/s 6 5 v/s 1 6 v/s 1 6 v/s 2 7 Team
Set 1 & 2 Set 3 & 4 Set 5 & 6 1 v/s 2 1 v/s 3 1 v/s 4 2 v/s 3 2 v/s 4 2 v/s 5 3 v/s 4 3 v/s 5 3 v/s 6 4 v/s 5 4 v/s 6 4 v/s 7 5 v/s 6 5 v/s 7 5 v/s 1 6 v/s 7 6 v/s 1 6 v/s 2 7 v/s 1 7 v/s 2 7 v/s 3 - The Home/Visitor balance will be perfect.
- Enough fields should be available for an even number of games-per-team in each week. (Usually, this will be 2 games/week.) If this is the case, each team will be assigned a home game and a visitor game in each week (or 2 of each if 4 games/week, etc.).
- The Home/Visitor sequencing will not be maintained properly if balancing is run, or "Mix Sets" is enabled, or the "Scheduling Algorithm" is other than "Normal", all of which shuffle the games around in each week.
- The teams with lower team numbers (team 1, 2, 3, as opposed to 7,8,9) will usually be playing home games earlier in the week. The effect of this can be reduced in subsequent round robins by selecting "team scramble" methods such as "random" and "reverse". This works great with an odd number of teams. However, when there are an even number of teams, the last set of the first round robin won't match properly with the first set of the subsequent round robin, resulting in one or more teams having two home or two visitor games in that week. The overall h/v balance will still be correct.
- Load from File -- This lets you specify a file that contains the pairings you want to use. This file can be either a "complete pairings file" that contains the pairings for a variety of numbers of teams, or it can be a "simple parings file" that contains only the pairings for this schedule. A "simple pairings file" is a simple text file with a header line like this:
# team1,team2
Which is followed by the pairs, one pair per line, using a number to designate the team in the pair, like this (blank lines and lines starting with "#" are ignored):
# team1,team2
1,2
3,4
5,61,4
3,6
5,21,6
3,2
5,41,3
2,6
4,51,5
4,6
2,4
You can also use team names instead of numbers. (The benefit of using numbers instead of names is that you can use a single pairings file for as many schedules as you want, with different team names in each schedule.). You cannot mix team names and team numbers in the same pairings file. If you use team names, those names cannot start with a digit.
The Team Scramble method affects how the team number in the pair is mapped to an actual team name in your schedule. Depending on the "scramble method" you've selected, this mapping can be different in each round robin.
Use the View / Edit Pairs button to see the resulting pairs that will be placed in your schedule.
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