An event is drawn one of three ways: a knockout, a championship and plate, or groups into a knockout. The same six players are in each picture below. A social night has no draw: see Running a club night.
Seeds and byes
A draw takes from 3 entries to 64. It is padded up to the next power of two, so 6 entries make a draw of 8 with 2 byes. Seeds and byes follow the LTA’s Competition Regulations.
- Seed 1 goes at the top and seed 2 at the bottom. Later seeds are split between the halves, so seeds meet as late as possible.
- Byes go to the seeds first, then spread evenly through the rest.
- How many seeds is capped: two up to 8 entries, four up to 16, eight up to 32, and 16 above that. Leave them blank and every line is drawn by lot.
Third place
Tick Play off for third place and the beaten semi-finalists play for it, beside the final. Once it is played, clear that score before you can switch it off.
The plate
Everybody who loses their first match goes into a second draw, so nobody goes home after one match. First match, not first round: Sam had a bye, lost in round two, and is in the plate too.
So the plate is drawn on a button, never by itself. Draw the plate waits until every entry’s first match has a result, and says how many are still to come in.
Group stages
Everybody plays everybody in their group once, scored like a box. Once every group match is in, press Draw the knockout. With two groups and two through from each, the pair from one group go into opposite halves, so they can only meet again in the final.
Four things are the event’s own, not the season’s:
- how many in a group (3 to 8)
- how many go through from each (1 to 4)
- which points table it is scored on
- how the table breaks a tie
Playing it
Players enter scores as they do in a box, and the winner appears in the next round. Nothing above the first round is stored: the bracket is worked out from the scores, so correcting a score corrects the draw.
A knockout match has to send somebody through, so it will not take “we ran out of court time”. Record a retirement or finish it. A group match can be unfinished.
Put a score in wrong? Open the match and press Clear result. Whoever it sent through comes out of the next round. If they have already played again, it names that match to clear first, and you work down from the top.