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knockouts:make-a-draw

Making a draw

The first step to making a draw is to click on the make draw link to the right of the round line. This will open up a selection of buttons and options below the round table.

Make byes

If there are any byes that need to be drawn first, your options will look like this:

In our example event, there are two seeds, plus there is one bye due in round 1, so the button prompts you to create three byes. Pressing this will allocate the two seeds to a bye, and another one at random.

Note that you can only create zero or one random byes at this stage, depending on if there are an even or odd number of random byes to draw. For example, if there are 11 random byes, you will select one now and the other 10 will be drawn while you are drawing the matches. For a completely random draw this doesn't make any difference, but for a constrained draw it's advisable to send all the teams to draw engine so that it can come up with the best draw possible.

You can also create a manual bye here, if you don't want to select a team at random. Clicking on the button takes you to a very simple form where you can select the team or match you wish to have the bye in this round.

Warning: it is difficult to test every scenario here, so there may still be combinations of numbers that the system gets confused by. If you find yourself unable to proceed because it asks you to create an impossible number of byes, please email us and we'll be able to fix it easily.

Unplayed matches

EBUKnockout handles unplayed matches without any trouble and you can actually draw out the entire event right from the beginning if you wish to. Instead of showing the name of the team in the match list, it will say something like Winner Round 1 Match 18, indicating that whoever wins Round 1 Match 18 will be inserted into this match.

When dealing with constrained draws, it's advisable not to draw too many rounds in advance as it can lead to some unfairness. For example, if you select the option to avoid teams from the same club playing each other and you have a match list like this:

If neither match is completed before you draw the next round, then the winners of these two matches will not be drawn together because there is the possibility that Aylesbury will win both. This makes the Thame B vs Oxford D match impossible in the next round, which is usually not desirable.

A warning on repechages

If your event has a repechage, a situation can theoretically arise where a pre-repechage match is unplayed at the time that a post-repechage match is drawn. Since both teams in the match can potentially play in this round via two different routes, the draw system can get confused. At this stage we don't intend to fix this problem, but advise organisers who are running a repechage to make sure that all the pre-repechage matches have been completed before starting to draw the post-repechage round.

Draw teams

After creating the byes, you'll need to press the make draw link again, which will now present a screen like this:

The majority of normal county events, which have no seeds or club restrictions, will want to just press the Make Random Draw button. This is a one-button job which draws the next round entirely at random. After which you're done.

More complicated draws need to be sent to the draw engine, which is an offline process that handles constrained draws. Unless you have enabled advanced geographical features you have two checkboxes here:

Avoid teams from same club means that teams from the same club cannot be drawn to play each other in this round. For these purposes, a team is from the same club if it has the same name (but not, of course, the same suffix).

Seeds must not meet in this round means that seeded teams will not be drawn together

Once you have set one or both of these options (there's no point in doing this if you set neither; you might as well make a quicker Random Draw) click the Check Constraints button. This will bring up a window showing the teams (or groups of teams) that need to be drawn, and who they are eligible to play in this round. If everything looks good, click Make Provisional Draw. This will send off a request to the draw engine, which usually takes a minute or two to fire up and process the data. While it's doing this, it's a good idea not to change any of the event details, so you will be prevented from making further changes until it has finished.

Bye priority

In both the random and the constrained draws, where there are byes still left to draw the system will, as far as possible, avoid giving a second bye to a team that has already had a bye. It will also avoid giving a bye to a team that has had a walkover (i.e. one who didn't actually play the match that they were awarded).

Editing a draw

You normally shouldn't want to edit a draw after it has been made as it rather destroys the integrity of the event. But sometimes it's necessary, for example if a team pulls out. Also, in the case of advanced geographical draws you may get a situation where it was impossible to make a complete draw and you have a few teams left over which you have to manually fix up.

One half of the process - creating matches - has already been covered above. You can create manual matches and manual byes through the make draw link, just as before. The other half is to destroy a match, which you can do by clicking on the match (or bye) in question. Here's what it looks like for a bye:

If you click Remove Match the team involved in this bye will once again be available to be drawn into a match. There's a similar button on the page for a match, which will free up both teams to be drawn.

By removing and creating matches manually, you should be able to assign any draw you desire.

Reverse draw

If you don't want to manually fiddle with a draw, there's always the option to click the reverse draw link next to the round. This gets rid of all the matches and you can start again with a clean slate.

Make the draw live

Up to now the draw has been provisional, which means only you as the event organiser can see it. This is indicated by the amber traffic light next to the round in the rounds table.

When you're finally happy with it, you can click on the make live link, which will turn the traffic light green. This also means:

  1. The team captains will see their new matches in their own My EBU, and will be able to submit results for them.
  2. It will appear in the public results pages.

You can always make a draw provisional again by clicking the make provisional link in the same area.

knockouts/make-a-draw.txt · Last modified: 2021/02/14 15:17 by 127.0.0.1