Many people think tournament fixtures and schedule mean the same thing. Actually, there is a difference, and let us see what exactly here in this post.
Fixtures mean who plays whom in the course of the tournament. Whether it is a round robin or a league tournament or another type of tournament such as heats in athletics, the fixtures will determine where a particular player/team is placed and how the player/team will have to progress to win the tournament.
Schedules actually add the place and time dimension to the fixtures. So while the fixtures tell that Team A is supposed to play Team B, the schedules actually define at what time the match will be held, and also the venue of the match.
Let us say you are organizing a badminton tournament in a stadium where there are 6 courts. The fixtures only say who plays who, but the schedules actually also say at what time and in which court each match will be held.
So how does an organizer do scheduling of matches? The old school way of scheduling, before the advent of smart tournament management softwares such as whatsscore, is to give a match number to each match that needs to be played. For each match, a certain number of minutes will be allocated, and so the organizer will try to allocate matches to the various courts he / she has booked in the stadium, until he exhausts all the match numbers of the tournament. For example, in a badminton knockout tournament, where there are 16 entries and 4 courts, the organiser will have 15 matches. Let us say he chooses to allocate 20 minutes per match, and he has booked 4 courts. Then he will allocate match 1 to court 1, match 2 to court 2, etc.. for the first 20 minutes, then at the 21st minute he will allocate match 4 to court 1, and so on until all the 15 matches are scheduled.
How do you do match scheduling with Whatsscore.com? One can still do old school way as the system provides time and venue of each match. But if you rather wish to avoid manual scheduling, then there is a premium feature of automatic scheduling where the system will do all the scheduling for you. Happy scheduling!
