Choosing a format
The format decides how many matches each team gets, how long the tournament runs, and how much the result depends on the draw. FairGame ships the systems below; picking one generates the right fixtures, and changing it regenerates them.
Round-robin groups
Teams are split into groups — four is the default — then every team plays every other team in its group once. Final standings rank the group by points.
How the groups are drawn depends on the strengths you enter. In the setup wizard, when strengths differ within a category, teams of similar strength are drawn into the same group, so every match is close. With equal or missing strengths, or when you split groups later on a category's page, the draw is balanced instead: serpentine seeding puts the strongest teams in different groups. Categories and groups has the detail.
Use it when fairness matters more than a decisive finish, and the field is small enough that everyone can play everyone. Match counts grow with the square of the group size, which is why groups stay small.
Swiss pool
The whole field stays in one pool instead of being split into groups of four. Each team plays a set number of rounds — five by default, editable on the Swiss card in the setup wizard — against opponents of its own registered strength, and nobody is knocked out. Twelve teams over five rounds is 30 matches, where everyone playing everyone would take 66. In an odd-sized field a team sits out each round, so with the rounds alone a few teams would play one match fewer. Where the numbers allow it, the draw adds one round so every team plays the same number of matches and sits out exactly once; otherwise it warns you that some teams play fewer.
In the wizard’s Tournament basics step, turn off Single-day tournament and choose an end date to spread a pool across several days. The selected dates survive Finish, and the pitch-time estimate uses the busiest day’s whole rounds. Enter each team’s strength on Teams & categories; if all strengths are equal, the wizard explains that the draw is arbitrary rather than strength-seeded.
Every round is drawn before the tournament, so the schedule publishes complete — time, opponent and pitch — like any other format. Auto-schedule plays the rounds in the order they were drawn, and a pool over several days spreads them evenly across the days, whole rounds per day: five rounds over two days play three on the first and two on the second. By default a team rests at least one round between two of its matches, a round being as long as the pool takes to play its longest round, however the day is packed; you set that rest in rounds, not minutes, in the setup wizard and under Settings → Schedule & format (see scheduling rules). The limit is the other side of that: because the draw is fixed before a ball is kicked, a team registered at the wrong strength plays among the wrong opponents all tournament. Getting the strengths right before you apply it matters more here than in any other format — see team strength and fairness. Where that is too much to ask, the pool can instead be drawn round by round from the results so far — see adaptive rounds.
By default a team does not meet the same opponent twice, and a pre-drawn pool only pairs teams whose strengths are close enough to make a fair match. Together those cap the rounds a field can play. The wizard shows the cap under Rounds — Maximum 5 rounds across your categories without rematches. Pre-drawn rounds also respect the supported strength gap. — and above it offers two ways out: Allow rematches, or play the rounds that fit. With rematches allowed, the pool plays its longest draw without a rematch, then starts that draw again from round 1, so every repeat comes as late as it can: four teams over four rounds meet everyone once in rounds 1–3, and round 4 repeats round 1. When only part of the draw is played again, rest comes first: in an odd-sized field, the team that sits out the extra round is the one that has gone longest without sitting out. After that, the rounds repeated are the ones where the fewest teams of the same club meet, so a pair that plays twice is from different clubs wherever the draw allows. Without that choice, FairGame refuses a round count the field cannot supply rather than drawing rematches. When a club enters several teams, the draw also keeps them apart where the field allows it, without widening the strength gap; where it cannot keep every pair of clubmates apart, as few as possible meet.
When the strengths differ, a short note after Finish says how wide the draw had to reach, for example Teams were ordered by strength in groups of 4. Opponents are at most 1 group apart.
Because its rounds are drawn, a Swiss pool is never filled by fixture generation: Generate all fixtures on the Categories page skips Swiss categories and says so, and a Swiss category has no generate button of its own — see categories and groups.
Use it when the field is too big for everyone to play everyone, but splitting it into groups would build a cliff — the bottom of one group and the top of the next are a goal apart in strength and never meet. It suits youth age groups particularly well, often together with not publishing a standings table.
The public table, admin Groups table, and Control room standings for a pre-drawn Swiss pool rank by points, then by the sum of opponents’ current group points (strength of schedule), then by the sport’s remaining score-based tiebreaks. Each scored meeting counts once; a bye adds zero. Correcting a result updates the opponents’ points and can change the order of tied teams. The SOS column and table key explain this tiebreak. Adaptive pools use the same Skill order and Skill column across these views. Round-robin tables keep their sport’s ranking rules.
Single-elimination knockout
Teams seed straight into a bracket, top seed against bottom seed, winners advancing. A third-place play-off between the losing semi-finalists is optional and off by default.
Use it when the field is large and the time is fixed. It is the shortest route to a champion — 16 teams need 15 matches — at the cost of half the field going home after one game.
Groups then knockout
A round-robin group stage seeds a single-elimination bracket: the top teams in each group advance, optionally with a plate competition for the rest. The classic cup weekend.
The bracket itself is built on the Knockout page once the groups are played out, and it is built from their tables — you never draw it. You set how many advance per group, whether the best third-placed teams fill the spare spots, the bracket's shape, whether the losing semi-finalists play a third-place play-off, how level games are decided, and whether seeding follows the group tables or each team's rating. Generating draws the bracket and puts its matches into the schedule; anything the day has no room for is called out with what to change. Clearing it removes every knockout match for that category, so you can change the settings and draw it again until results start arriving.
Its groups are drawn the same way as round-robin groups, above.
This is the default recommendation for youth and club tournaments. Everyone gets guaranteed group matches, the finish is decisive, and a plate bracket means nobody stops playing early.
Re-seeding ladder
For large multi-day youth fields. Every day is a round-robin in groups of four, arranged as a ladder of tiers. An uneven field is divided into groups of similar size; for example, 66 teams form fifteen groups of four and two groups of three. Short groups and finals byes can mean different match counts for some teams. Between days, each group's top finishers climb a tier and its bottom finishers drop, so teams settle among opponents of their own strength within a day or two.
It solves the problem a straight draw cannot: with 300 teams of wildly different strength, the first day's results are the only reliable seeding information you will ever have, and this format uses them.
Re-seeding ladder with cup finals adds per-tier finals on the last day, so every team plays a meaningful final among its peers rather than a dead rubber.
Each category runs its own ladder. You can include several age groups or divisions in one tournament; their teams, standings and finals stay separate. In Groups, select a category before advancing it to the next day or drawing its cup finals — ladder formats walks through both. One category can advance while another is still finishing its matches.
The setup wizard applies your chosen system to each category that has teams. You can also finish with empty categories, import teams later, then open Settings → Schedule & format → Tournament systems and apply the system to each category. Choose the target category before applying; replacing its draw keeps the other categories' fixtures and results. Categories share the calendar and the group-stage day-spread setting, so applying an incompatible calendar or day spread is rejected.
Calibration round + groups
For a large field whose registered strengths you do not trust. Teams first play a short round-robin in balanced groups whose only job is to measure them — nobody is eliminated. The whole field is then ranked on those results and drawn into main-round groups of similar strength, so the real competition is played among peers, and each tier finishes with its own cup final. It is modelled on the Icelandic forkeppni format run by N1-mótið, and the wizard offers it in shapes from two to five days.
Calibration ranking under Settings → Schedule & format decides how the results become the main groups. Group position first seeds every group winner above every runner-up, and so on down; the measured rating only breaks ties within a position. Measured rating orders the whole field by the rating the calibration round produced, so a strong group's runner-up can be seeded above a weak group's winner.
You move a category from the calibration round into the main round from Groups, the same way a ladder advances. Selecting the category there also shows How the groups were drawn: each team's registered strength beside its calibration result and measured rating, the resulting rank and group, and any teams not carried into the main round. Check it before you advance — a team registered two levels off shows up here first.
Choosing
| Your situation | Format |
|---|---|
| Fewer than about six teams per division | Round-robin groups |
| A big field, even matches, nobody knocked out | Swiss pool |
| Large field, hard time limit, one champion | Single-elimination knockout |
| Guaranteed matches and a real winner | Groups then knockout |
| Hundreds of teams over several days | Re-seeding ladder |
| A big field, strengths unreliable, a few days to find them | Calibration round + groups |
Beyond the built-in systems
If none of these matches how your tournament actually runs, compose your own out of phases — see building a custom format. The bracket that finishes a format has settings of its own: knockout brackets.
The format is not the only thing that shapes a competition. The sport decides the vocabulary, the match length and how the table is ranked — see sports and terminology.
Changing your mind
The format is a setting, not a commitment. Change it and the fixtures regenerate; the preview shows the new match count and finish time before you accept anything. Model two options and compare them before you announce the tournament — that is much cheaper than discovering on the Saturday that Sunday does not fit.
Regenerating fixtures replaces the matches that exist. Do it during setup freely; once results are being entered, change the format only if you genuinely intend to restart the competition.