It’s hard to trust computer-based randomization, especially because you tend to remember exceptional events, like the fact that Billy got paired with Betty three weeks in a row. But sometimes you flip five straight tails, and sometimes you’re dealt a full house. I’ll explain below how randomization works and offer up some data that shows why you can trust Scoreholio.
With all kinds of rec sports tournaments cancelled and players stuck at home, league organizers and tournament directors have been scrambling to come up with online ways to satisfy their players’ desire to play against real competition.
Welcome to Scoreholio Live, the best way to keep your edge by playing against
real competition, all across the country, in real time! Here’s how it works…
The most gratifying thing about running Scoreholio is hearing how we help make life easier for those who use cornhole to build community and camaraderie with leagues and weekly blind draws. I thought this note from Jim Psik who runs West Branch Cornhole in Williamsport, Pennsylvania, was not only super nice but does a great job of explaining the value of Scoreholio in the words of a user.
Cornhole and other bar sports are almost always played between two individuals or 2-person teams, but Scoreholio now gives tournament directors and league administrators the ability to combine people and teams into “squads” that take each other on in a battle for supremacy. It’s a fun format that can turn individually-oriented games into collective competitions that generate great camaraderie and community, and we’re calling it “Squadholio.”
Last night I ran my 54th Switcholio tournament at Hapa’s Brewing Company in San Jose as the weekly blind draw of Silicon Valley Cornhole, a club I founded 2 years ago. That represents a full year of Switcholio, because on Wednesday January 16, 2019 I ran the first Switcholio tournament…in the world…EVER! The anniversary inspired me to look back at the inception of the idea and the amazing way it’s grown and impacted how cornhole is played across the country.
There’s no other system that does a better job of quantifying cornhole players’ skill level and ranking them than the SPR system we’ve been beta testing for a few months…bar none! But if you know us, you know that’s not good enough. We’ve tweaked and tuned the algorithm behind SPR, addressed lots of concerns that came up, listened to what YOU wanted out of an upgraded player experience, ad have come up with something we really think you’re going to like.
Last week my home town of Santa Clarita experienced a school shooting that took two young lives, seriously injured three more, and deeply affected every one of us who live here and love this town. I now know first-hand the trauma of needing to get your family together, safe, while begrudgingly respecting the need to lock schools down, shelter in place and let law enforcement do their job, and I wouldn’t wish that experience and helpless feeling on anybody.
I also, through cornhole, now know the gratifying feeling of helping the community you love come together to heal and support the victims of something like this.
Scoreholio’s unique “Switcholio” format is that it facilitates doubles play without requiring people to bring their own partner, or even locking people into a partnership with one player for the entire event. This means people can come and go as they please, affecting only their own point total. It’s perfect for unpredictable environments.
Since its inception, Scoreholio has been a labor of love. We LOVE working with y’all to craft a tournament automation platform that’s changing the game for the better, and look forward to continuing to do so. Can’t forget the LABOR though – building and continuously improving an app like Scoreholio ain’t easy, nor is offering live chat support to a rapidly growing customer base. That’s why on October 1st we’ll introduce a few upgrade options that’ll give appreciative users a way to show us some love, help us keep providing kickass support, and fund the continuing enhancement of the app.
Getting started with any new piece of software can be daunting, especially one you’ll be using to do something as complex as running a cornhole tournament. We’ve tried to answer a bunch of questions in our FAQ and provide docs and tutorials that help you learn how to do everything you’ll need to do, but I wanted to summarize here the steps involved it with getting started with Scoreholio.
Many people incorrectly think Scoreholio won’t work for big events because they learn the app supports up to 8 courts per “tournament” and brackets are limited to 32 participants. But most tournaments bigger than that break things up anyway. One approach is to run skill-based brackets or pools like advanced, competitive and social. Another approach is to run round robin pools and then seed upper and lower playoffs based on the results. This is the approach most really big tournaments (like 300+ team Spencer Makenzie’s Throwdown) use, and it’s a great fit for Scoreholio.
Weekly drop in blind draw cornhole tournaments are tons of fun and a great way to welcome new players to the game, but there are also advantages to running a multi-week set teams league. Running a cornhole league is “easy peasy” thanks to using Scoreholio’s exportable game log and ability to import teams. These tools give you the flexibility to do whatever works for your club and venue. I made this video about import/export for leagues a while ago, and will explain how to do it below.
No matter what format you run, if you assign partners totally at random you frequently end up with some stacked teams and some weak teams, which doesn’t make for a fun event. Before Scoreholio I addressed this problem by classifying my players as As and Bs with playing cards. While discussing this problem with fellow club runners, I had the idea of assigning people a new partner for every game of the round robin. And Switcholio was born! Switcholio is a blind draw round robin in which players get a new partner for every game, and get ranked on an individual basis. The organizer can use that leaderboard to recognize and reward top finishers, or seed them into a single elimination playoff.
There are lots of ways you can set up a Scoreholio-powered tablet scoreboard at each court. I’ll introduce below the options you have, from simple tablet stands to score towers you can buy, plus some of the creative solutions our users (including me) have built on their own.
One of the best things about round robin is that everybody gets to play the same number of games. To make sure that happens, you need to know many games you should let them play, how many courts you should run, etc. The good news is that it’s easy peasy thanks to some rules of thumb I’ll share below. I’ll explain a little bit of the “why” for you curious types.
If you’re looking for easiest peasiest mode, here’s two things that render the rest of this blog unnecessary.
4 is Your Friend: If you run four games, you’ll always be golden.
Odd + Odd = Bad: Don’t run an odd # of games and an odd # of teams.
I bet you’re used to double elimination cornhole tournaments where you’re a “loser” with one loss and out of the action with a second. It’s the most common format by far, but during several years running double elimination cornhole tournaments I became painfully familiar with a few huge drawbacks. I think double elimination brackets became popular because running one used to be easier than round robin, but Scoreholio has made round robin easy peasy. Here’s how to set up and run a round robin tournament with a playoff using Scoreholio.