Have you ever thought to organize a Scrabble tournament by your own or with your club but you don't know how or what to do? Or maybe you don't know about the rules, resources, format and where to find all of these.
Well here,
Scrabble Talk is going to give you some useful tips that you can apply in organizing a tournament. The tips here are based on
the writer experience in joining and organizing tournaments for years.
Here are some tips (and also tricks) to organize a Scrabble tournament.
BEFORE TOURNAMENT
Check tournament/academic calendar
First, you need to check and synchronize national calendar and academic calendar (if any). This action is to prevent clashing with another event/tournament. There are some tournaments that have already been established, like
Asian English Olympics in mid February,
E.COM in September and else. Set the date a long way before.
Form a committee
Actually in a Scrabble tournament, you don't need too much core committee members. Project officer, tournament, registration and support are enough for the core team. You can cover each other's works as well. Find a team that you can cooperate and work with well, be effective. During tournament, you might need more people to assist the committee and the participants, just ask for help.
In the end, it's all up to you what kind of team and how big is the team that you want to form :).
Tournament format
Nowadays, most competitions use one-on-one tournament format. There's no elimination and all players play the same amount of rounds. You need to be aware of these things if you want your tournament to be rated (Rating explanation below). Usually, you can make two or three-day-long tournament and it can fit 12-20 rounds. To attract more participants, you can divide the tournament into two or more divisions. The divisions are usually based on
ratings (1200 pts mark). One of the three-day tournament with divisions example is
Indonesia Scrabble Challenge 2014.
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| Indonesia Scrabble Challenge 2014 Format (via indonesianscrabble.org) |
Apply for rating
Rating is a point to measure player's skill in Scrabble. Tournaments in Indonesia can be rated by
Indonesian Scrabble Federation (ISF). There are some criteria for a tournament in order to be rated, the number of games, the number of participants and tournament format (see above). If you have follow the format, submit your rating application form to ISF.
It's better to submit your application way before your tournament starts, the latest time to submit is
one month before the tournament starts.
Note : You will be advised not to publish your tournament as a rated tournament by ISF before you get the approval.
Publication
Do a good publication long before the tournament starts. You don't want your tournament lacks of participants right? If your tournament is accepted to be rated, your tournament info will be posted on ISF website so Scrabble players from all around Indonesia will know. Post your tournament info also on
ISC Facebook group, most Indonesian Scrabble players are there.
Make sure you include all important info, like is it rated or not, total rounds that are going to be played, is there any division and is it open for public or not. Make it clear and not confusing.
Also be responsive to inquires about your tournament.
Funding
You need some money to fund your tournament. Find a subsidy from your institution or sponsors. Make a financial planning from best to the worst one. This will help you to deal with various cases.
DURING TOURNAMENT
Venue
Find a hall or a big room to be used as a venue. One spacious room is better than some small rooms since it'll be easier for you to navigate in bigger room. Prepare the room setting with director tables at the front and playing tables for two or four players each. Give some space between the tables to make you and players moving around easily.
Tabulation
You need to tabulate all the scores from each round. Pairings from each round use the result from the previous round.
There's a tournament software called
AuPair to tabulate the scores and do pairings. AuPair program will generate .TOU file that consists of tournament scores. You need a laptop/computer to do the tabulation.
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| AuPair |
Pairings
Pairings is a match-up for players in each round. There are usually two types of pairings that used in tournament,
Australian draw and
King of The Hill.
Australian draw is a pairing which two players can't meet each other more than once in a period of time which has been set (no repeat). This pairing is also known as
Swiss Pairing.
Meanwhile, King of The Hill (KOTH) means two players can meet each other repeatedly without any condition. King of The Hill is usually used in latter rounds of a tournament.
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| Australian Draw example |
There's also a special case where the top player can't be caught anymore in the remaining number of rounds so the top player will be
Gibsonized (Gibson rule). Gibson rule means the top player won't face players that still competing for a place in prize pool. He/she will take a player that can't make it to prize pool in remaining rounds. This will preserve a fairer competition for players in contention for prize pool.
Boards, tiles, timer, word judge
Make sure you have enough amount of board set and timer. Do spare two or three in case of additional participants or unexpected broken timer/board.
For tiles, make sure each set has a complete 100 tiles with correct distribution.
You can use
apps in smartphone instead of Scrabble/chess timer. Use
Zyzzyva as the word judge in laptop.
See the
Resource page to find more useful tools.
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| Scrabble timer (pic credit : SamTimer.com) |
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| Zyzzyva for iOS |
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| Zarf timer for iOS |
Score sheet, result slip
Players need score sheet to track their and opponents score so do prepare it for the players. Result slip is optional but highly suggested to have, the use is to record the final result, other important data and as an agreement between two players where they have to sign on it.
Again, see the
Resource page to find the sheet. You can make your own result slip format that contains winner & loser names, winner & loser scores, winner & loser signs and high word (optional). Write down the round (and division if any) on the result slip to help you process the results.
AFTER TOURNAMENT
Tournament report
After the tournament is finished, publicize the result and make a report document of tournament if your tournament is rated by ISF.
.TOU file
You need to save the .TOU file of the full tournament result and submit the file to ISF to be processed. The file is
very important to calculate tournament rating and to publish the result on
ISF website. Do create a backup of it.
Rules :
WESPA Rules V2
We hope with this post, it can help you to organize more Scrabble tournament in Indonesia.
If you have any question, please comment below.
