P4match app for tournaments

Hi guys

I want to talk to you about an APP which is getting more and more popular here in Japan which helps organize tournaments.
The situation at the amateur level in Japan is that there is no regular championships. On the other hand, the local leagues organize regularly local tournaments (team or individual) , like 10 times a year in my local league. OTOH, there are also many open tournaments which are opened to everyone, and there is this new class of tournaments "P4match" which are not KO tournaments but round robin tournaments, a bit like chess.
The organizer decides the number of rounds. (typically 3 to 6 matches)

The app enables to
- list tournaments
- list teams as to avoid that players from the same team play against each other.
- manage the inscriptions and payments of players
- maintain a private system of ranking (there is no national or official ranking at the amateur level) based on the results of P4match tournaments only
- organize the pairings. people are divided in groups (of max 20) according to their level. Then in the initial round the algo pairs stronger players with lower ranked players. In the next round, the algo will pair someone who has won a game with someone who also won a game, and pair someone who lost with someone who lost, considering the ratings as well when doing this. Then in the next rounds the pairing algo pairs players who have around the same win ratio.

The algo ensures that players will end up playing with people from around their level, and that the winner has met strong players along his way
- The app manages the scheduling of the matches on the tables so that very little time is lost. Its very efficient at that.
- The results of the games are recorded on the app by the referee (or the players themselves). So it makes it possible for everyone to see the results of the other games while the tournament is in progress, and those results are archived as well

The app and this kind of tournament is getting more and more popular with for example 16 tournaments in all Japan listed for next month.
The appeal is that little time is lost, and for players which are not very strong, they can play a good number of matches, while in a traditional KO tournament, they are usually paired with a stronger guy in round 1 and just go home immediately after a long waiting. Even if there is a group, way more often than not, its a group of 3 with a stronger guy, and it leaves only another game.

The app starts to work with other sports like Badminton which is getting very popular here.

Would that app be useful in your country ? do you think there could be some demand for that ?
what adaptations would need to be done ?

the developer is Japanese and cannot speak/read/write English but I believe he could find some help (mine or someone else) to try to sell its usage abroad...
The app is getting popular but after 2 years he's barely breaking even with the current usage.

I believe he needs to scale the usage of the app to other countries

The site is P4match.com (all in Japanese only), you can try to make an account and navigate, with some automatic translation tool

mart1nandersson said:

I guess that the main showstopper is that most national TTA's only sanction one reporting system. There's a quite "big" upset here in Sweden with the license cost of the tournament software (TT-Coordinator) that the Swedish TTA enforces and some have home up with alternative solutions but these are simply ignored / rejected by the Swedish TTA.

Is this solution sanctioned / approved by the JTTA?

Click to expand...

no its not approved by JTTA. these tournaments are totally private. there is no JTTA sanctioned ranking system at the amateur level
even at the pro level, i think they simply rank players according to their performance at the national championships and thats all

so the p4 enables people to play more tournaments, play more matches (because you don't get KO'ed) and enjoy a rating