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Wednesday, August 25, 2010

Simple, short but fun tournaments

For the past 2 months, Amelia Island Boules meets every Wednesday night at Cafe Karibo, starting at 6pm.
Beautiful setting (nice & drinks galore), but ... there are only 2 courts, you never know how many people will show up, and at what time. The courts are lit, but most folks like to head home by 8:30pm.
So one needs to improvise. We use a deck of cards to mix players into teams, fast. Doubles or triples - or some of both if need be - , depending on the attendance.

The usual way to "compact" games is to play to e.g. 7 points instead of 13 or to limit the game to, say 30 minutes. Both systems have pros and cons.
Thanks to input from pragmatic members (hat tip to Colleen & John), we now shorten games to 4 rounds (or ends, or throws or "mènes" in French). It's simple, fair, and there's no room for misinterpretation. A game lasts 20 to 25 minutes.
For instance tonight, we had 16 players, and made 8 teams of two. A total of 12 games were played, plus a tiebreaker between the two teams that won their 3 games.
By 8:30 the winners were known, and got the weekly $30 gift certificate from Cafe Karibo.

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