OOAK Table Tennis Forum

Which handicap systems have you found to work well? I'm organising a tournament for a reasonable ability range, with entry of 15-20 people, and 4-5 tables, over one evening.

What have you tried, or experienced, and enjoyed?

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Yasaka Sweden Classic | 802 OX | C8 OX
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I've done this and how i did it was took entries and worked out how many points the best player would need to give the worst player. In our case it was 16. Then what i did was just distribute the random players evenly in between. If i had 20 entrants i divided 16 by 20 and added that figure on down the list and rounded up.

For the matches we played best of 5 but you always to the lower to 0 and gave the higher a head start. Eg if your handicap number was 5 and mine was 12, you would give me 7 points each game. You start on 0 and i start on 7.

The higher handicap must always win 2 points so if the difference was say 14 then the match would be first to 16.

Just a tip, you generally need to give a couple more points to lower players than what you would think.

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If they are graded in any way you could do what the club I played at did:

For each grade give a range between lowest & highest, then allocate to the actual players within that grade. For the very best and very worst players overall, do some fudging - give the very worst less of a handicap than you "think" and the very best more.

We used to play 1 game to 31 no advantage, and do knock out format from the start. I recall being on -55 or so and there were some on +10 or so. We sometimes used proportions to shorten the actual game, eg if I had to play someone on +15, they had to win 16 points and I had to win 86 points. This could reduce to them starting on +21 and me on -24 say to preserve the ratio. We did have a rule with this that to win you had to score at least 8-10 points to allow a bit for edges and nets.

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