How to Run Big Multi-Stage Cornhole Tournaments with Scoreholio
Most people first encounter Scoreholio as a system for weekly blind draws with a few dozen people, but you can use Scoreholio to run tournaments ranging from a dozen friends in your backyard to multi-day multi-stage tournaments featuring hundreds of participants.
The Misconception that Scoreholio Isn’t Good for Big Tournaments
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.
How to Run Small, Medium and XXL Tournaments with Scoreholio
I’ll set the stage for explaining how Scoreholio works so well for really big tournaments by walking you through how it works for tournaments of various sizes. The key to all of these examples is starting off with a round robin phase that guarantees participants a certain number of games, and then seeding playoffs based on the results instead of self selection or some other system. (More on that here.)
Running a Small (30 team) Multi-Stage Cornhole Tournament with Scoreholio
Let’s start with a fairly modest tournament: 30 teams. Most tournament directors aim for a ratio of about 4 teams per court, so let’s call that 8 courts. Yes you could run the whole thing as one bracket, or a couple skill-based brackets, but to establish the model I suggest for big events let’s look at the option of running teams through round robin and seeding them into playoff brackets from there.
To keep things simple let’s say you run all 30 teams as part of a single round robin, with each team playing 4 or maybe 6 games against random opponents, then split them up into two playoff brackets, gold and silver. For each of those playoff brackets, you just use Scoreholio’s “Import” feature to pull through the appropriate players from the round robin. My example shows the top 16 advancing to gold playoffs and the rest to silver, but you can do that any way you want.
Running a Medium Tournament with Scoreholio
Now let’s double the number of teams to 60. I’d split the teams into two round robins of 30 teams each, then advance the top 16 of each into a common gold bracket of 32 teams, and the rest into a common silver bracket of 32 teams, and crown a champion of each bracket.
Running a Large Tournament with Scoreholio
Scaling up to a tournament of 120 teams uses the same logic and system, you’ll just need to start creating multiple brackets.
Running an XXL Cornhole Tournament with Scoreholio
Let’s double things again to 240 teams. Hopefully by now you get how you can scale to any size using pools and brackets that break things up and give players a better experience. More guaranteed games, played more evenly over a longer period of time.
