TournamentService will perform cup pairing according to the single elimination or "sudden death" knockout rules. Usually, each match consists of to games with alternating colors, but the numer of games can be changed in the tournament settings. TS will support cup pairing in both individual- and team events.
The pairing is performed one round at a time. The basis for pairing is the currently registered results so make sure everything is correct before you start the pairing procedure from the menu.
TS will seed the players so that the highest ranked will play against the lowest ranked, number two will meet the second lowest ranked and so on. That way, the excpected top matches will not occur until the semi-finals and the final. You choose how to rank the players while seeding by defining criterias for pairing.
Additionally, TS will seed again the remaining players after each round using the same rules. This means, you cannot in advance declare, for example, that "the winner of 1/8-final A is to meet the winner of 1/8-final D". These rules are called "knockout with re-seeding"
If one or more mathes results in a draw, TS will automatically generate additional tiebreak games as neccessary, when you start pairing the next round. The number of tiebreak games per match is also settable in the tournament settings. If you are going to tiebrak with one armageddon-game, you enter ONE tiebreak game (TB) in the tournament settings. Alternatively you can enter two or more tiebreak games in this field. TS will continue to generate tiebreaks games with alternating colors as necessary until a match winner is declared. When calculating score for the standings report, the tiebreak-games will not count, they are only used to declare a match winner.
TS will not automatically set up the bronze-final match. If you want one, this match must be entered manually in the main entry screen (by assigning opponents and colors). TS will detect this and calculate the standings correctly.
In traditional cup-systems there usually are 4,8,16,32,64 or 128 players. TS does not have this limitation! If the number of players is not one of the power-of-two numbers, TS will assign a walkover to the highest ranked player which has not had WO earlier.
An alternative way to adjust the number of players to one of these powers-of-two (4,8,16..), is to start with a qualification tournament.
In TS you can start the tournament as an ordinary round-robin/monrad/swiss or whatever, with as many players as you like. After a pre-determined number of rounds, you can open the tournament settings and change the pairing system to CUP. Then, you mark as "unavailabe" the players who is NOT to play the cup ending. The easiest way to do this is to order the entry screen by rank (Select "Options - sort by - ranked order"). Then, leave the top 8 players as avaliable and set the rest to "Unavailable".
By doing it this way, you are able to report the entire event in one file.
Generaly, cup tournaments isn't very good at ranking players except the winner and runner-up. Still, TS will by default calculate and use buchholz scores in an attempt to rank the rest of the players fairly. In pure cup events, this calculation is based on all rounds up to and including the last game in the gold final. However, in hybrid tournaments only the qualifying group play will be calculated, i.e. buchholz score is calculated up to and including the round before the first cup match. This is neccessary to avoid having the rank of the un-qualified players changing during the cup ending..
Normally the final is played over the same number of games as all other matches in the tournament. But some tournaments has decided the final to be, for example, 4 games (while all other matches are 2). In TS you can do it like this:: Set the number of games per match to 2 and run the tournament as usual. After pairing the first game of the final match you may change the number of games per match from 2 to 4. Then you can continue pairing ordinary games and/or any tiebreaks as usual.