Why is it important to sort matches on mats properly?

One of the stages of organizing martial arts competitions with the MartialMatch system is to create a list of matches to be played on the day of the competition.

Matches lists are created after planning the schedule. Based on this, the application will create matches on the mats we have chosen. At this stage, we could already start the competition, but there is one more thing we can do to streamline the competition. This is sorting fights.

Why is sorting fights important? It allows you to optimize the list of fights in such a way that it gives the competitors a break between fights. After generating fights from the schedule, the categories are arranged one after the other.

The benefits are:

• competitors will have a break to rest 😁,
• this will cause less confusion during the competition - we will not have to move fights around,
• the competition will run more smoothly.

Ways of sorting matches

Freshly generated list of matches has categories arranged one after the other, below you can see that right after the semi-finals are the finals:

It means no break for the winners of the semi-finals before the finals.

The application allows you to automatically sort the fights to avoid this problem. On the schedule list, click Sorting fights:

With a break

Sorting With a break arranges fights on mats in such a way that it gives competitors a few fights break between fights. This way, e.g. before the final fight, the winners of the semi-finals will have a "two fights" break.

We can also set the number of fights the system should try to insert as a break.

This way of sorting is dependent on what categories we have on the mats. If we set a large number of fights for a break, it may not work at the end of the fights where there will simply be a lack of fights from other categories.

By rounds (finals at the end)

This way of sorting is popular at submission fighting / ADCC events. The mat is sorted so that the final fights of all are played at the end.

• The fights are arranged according to the size of the categories.
• The largest category starts first.
• Then, if we have the same round in other categories, the next categories are added.
• When the whole round is arranged for all categories, the next round is laid out.

Eg. having categories:

• A - 32 competitors
• B - 8 competitors
• C - 8 competitors

This will give us the following layout:

1. 1/16 round of category A.
2. 1/8 round of category A (because the other categories do not have a 1/16 round).
3. Quarterfinals of category A (also because the other categories do not have 1/8).
4. Quarterfinals of category B.
5. Quarterfinals of category C.
6. Semifinals of category A.
7. Semifinals of category B.
8. Semifinals of category C.
9. Final of category A.
10. Final of category B.
11. Final of category C.

As you can see above, all categories end at the same time.

By rounds (begin all categories at once)

This way of sorting is similar to the previous one, but here we are guaranteed that all categories will start at the same time, instead of ending at the same time.

It will be best to illustrate this with an example. Having categories as above, we will have:

1. 1/16 round of category A.
2. Quarterfinals of category B. (After the first round of A, the first round of the next category starts)
3. Quarterfinals of category C.
4. 1/8 round of category A.
5. Semifinals of category B.
6. Semifinals of category C.
7. Quarterfinals of category A.
8. Final of category B.
9. Final of category C.
10. Semifinals of category A.
11. Final of category A.