Three tournaments ran on FairGame this weekend, and between them they put 217 teams on the pitch. Fylkir's Bikarmót for 6. flokkur and Fjölnir's árgangamót both played on Saturday, and Fylkir's Bikarmót for 7. flokkur plays on Sunday.

Each one runs on a different tournament system: groups where everyone plays everyone at Fylkir on Saturday, groups followed by a knockout at Fjölnir, and a Swiss pool for Fylkir's youngest players on Sunday. All three run from the same admin app, with parents and coaches following along in the FairGame app on their phones. This is what the weekend looked like from the organizers' side of the table.

Our last post was nine days ago, on September 17th, and it ended by saying the rebuilt iOS app was not something you could install yet. It is now, on iPhone and iPad, and the new Android app went out the same day.

The rest of this post covers a tournament format FairGame did not have before, the Swiss pool, which you can draw in advance or round by round as results come in; a match clock the whole hall plays to; and a setting that stops a 12–0 from being published as 12–0. A good share of the work in between is invisible, mostly release tooling for the apps, error reporting and making the admin app hold up at 512 teams, and we have left it out.

Our last post was two weeks ago, on September 4th. Most of what shipped since went into two things you cannot see: a native iOS app we are rebuilding from scratch and have not put in anyone's hands yet, and a long pass over error reporting so we hear about failures before you tell us about them.

What did change for organizers came mostly from one place. A club ran a real tournament on FairGame, wrote down everything that got in their way, and sent us the list. Working through it turned out to be the most useful fortnight we have had in a while, because none of it was invented by us.

Our last post here was three weeks ago, on August 13th. Three weeks is not long, but FairGame looks different now: the tournament assistant we had been building quietly is ready to use, and a handful of other changes shipped alongside it.

Most of what changed under the hood is fixes and polish you would never notice. This post is about the parts that change what you can actually do: an assistant that acts on your tournament when you ask it to, a knockout bracket rebuilt from scratch, referees who cover for each other without you assigning a single shift, and a registration model that finally separates who signs up from who pays.

Type in your teams and get a complete fixture list on the spot: a round-robin schedule where every team plays every other team, or a seeded knockout bracket ready for a finals day. It runs right here in the page — free, no signup, nothing to install.

Below the generator you will find a short explanation of how the fixtures are built, so you can defend the draw when a coach questions it.

To build a round-robin schedule in Excel, list your teams in one column, keep the first team fixed, and rotate the rest one position each round — this is the circle method, and it guarantees every team plays every other exactly once in n − 1 rounds.

Below is the manual layout, the formula that does the rotating for you, and the point at which a spreadsheet stops being the right tool.

To schedule a tournament across multiple venues, first check the day fits at all — total pitch-minutes available against match-minutes required — then place fixtures so no team is ever booked in two places at once, and never expects a team to cross town between back-to-back matches.

The hard part is not the fixture list. It is the travel, the rest, and the fact that every constraint interacts with every other one.

Choose a round-robin when the field is small and fairness matters most, a knockout when the field is large and time is short, and a Swiss system when you have a large field but still want every team to play the same number of matches.

Here is how the three compare on the things that actually decide it: matches per team, total time, and how much administration they cost you on the day.

A tournament bracket generator seeds teams by ranking them first, then placing them so the strongest cannot meet until the latest possible round — the top seed plays the bottom seed, the second seed plays the second-bottom, and so on down the list.

Getting that placement right is what separates a bracket that feels fair from one that produces a great final by luck.

Knockout rounds are the stages of a tournament where the loser of each match is eliminated and the winner moves on. Each round halves the field, so 16 teams become 8, then 4, then 2, then a single champion.

They are also called elimination rounds or the bracket, and they are what most people picture when they think of a tournament finish.