How do you run a badminton tournament at your club?

Every other racket sport lets you plan forward from court time. Badminton does not, and the reason is on the entry form: the same person enters singles, men's or women's doubles, and mixed. One entrant becomes three lines in three different draws.

BWF regulation 11.4 is explicit about what that costs you:

Any Player participating in two matches is entitled to a minimum interval of 60 minutes between them. In exceptional circumstances, the Referee can reduce the minimum interval to no less than 30 minutes between two matches.

Read that as a scheduling law rather than a courtesy. A player with three events who reaches the quarter-finals in each plays six to nine matches, and every consecutive pair of them needs an hour in between. You cannot compress that by adding courts — the constraint sits on the person, not on the hall.

So the first decision is not the draw size. It is how many events one entrant may play. Three events on a single day is realistic only with a shortened match format and a hall that empties slowly. Two events is the club default. One event per day, with the other draws on a second day, is what a serious weekend tournament does.

Once you know how many events a person may enter, the court arithmetic becomes ordinary. Multiply courts by hours and divide by a realistic match length:

Match format	Planning length	Matches per court in 8 hours
Best of 3 games to 21	30–45 min	11–16
Best of 3 games to 15	22–32 min	15–21
One game to 21	12–18 min	26–40
Best of 5 games to 11	25–35 min	14–19

These are planning figures for club play, not BWF data — an elite three-game singles match runs well past an hour, and a first-round mismatch is over in twelve minutes. Use them to size the day, then keep one court unscheduled to absorb the overrun.

Six courts across an eight-hour Sunday is roughly 48 court-hours. At best of 3 to 21 that is around 80 matches — enough for a 64-draw singles event, or for singles and doubles at 32 each. The rest rule is what stops you doing all three.

A knockout draw of N players needs N−1 matches. Nothing about badminton changes that, and it is the number you should sanity-check every plan against:

Draw	Matches	Rounds
8	7	3
16	15	4
32	31	5
64	63	6

Entry lists rarely land on a power of two, and they do not have to. Regulation 11.5.2 defines byes precisely: the number of byes is the difference between the entry count and the next power of two. Seventeen entries in a draw of 32 means fifteen byes. Those fifteen players walk into round two, and the draw is 16 matches rather than 31 — which usually helps your schedule.

A round robin inverts the shape. Eight players is 28 matches, sixteen is 120. That is why round robin belongs to groups of four or five, not to whole events.

Groups plus a knockout is where most club tournaments land. Everyone gets three matches instead of the one a first-round loss buys, and a bracket still produces a champion the same day. JudgeMate builds this in fixed shapes: two or four groups, with one or two advancing from each. Three groups of five is not something the wizard will assemble for you.

A draw exists to keep the strongest entries apart until late. BWF regulation 11.8.1 sets how many entries get that protection, and it scales with the entry count, not the bracket size:

Entries	Maximum seeds
fewer than 16	2
16 to 31	4
32 to 63	8
64 to 128	16
129 or more	32

Badminton is more generous here than tennis, where seeding stops at 16 however large the draw. A 256-entry badminton event may seed 32.

Placement is fixed at the top and drawn by lot below it. Seed 1 goes on the first line of the draw and seed 2 on the last, so they can only meet in the final. Seeds 3 and 4 are drawn by lot into the two remaining quarters, seeds 5 to 8 into the remaining eighths, and seeds 9 to 16 into the remaining sixteenths. Within a section, a seed in the top half sits at the top of its section and a seed in the bottom half at the bottom.

One more rule worth borrowing at club level: regulation 11.12 keeps entries from the same member association in opposite halves and, wherever possible, out of each other's first round. Translate that as two players from the same club should not meet in round one. JudgeMate does not enforce that automatically — if it matters at your event, check the draw before you publish it and re-draw if two clubmates land together.

At a club you rarely have a ranking to seed from. Seeding in JudgeMate comes from the order of your own start list: the position you enter a player in is the strength the draw assumes. There is no federation ranking feed. Say so on the entry form and nobody argues afterwards.

Badminton categories are not variants of one event; they are three events that happen to share a hall. Each gets its own draw, its own entry list and its own schedule.

A badminton category in JudgeMate defaults to singles, where the entry list is simply the list of people. Switching it to doubles changes what an entry means: a pair, with one player creating the team and the other joining by name. Mixed doubles is a doubles category you name that way — there is no gender field on an entry, so the pairing is yours to control.

The entry that breaks sign-up sheets is the player without a partner. Give them a way to mark themselves as looking for one, so they land on a list you can pair before the draw rather than in a text message the night before.

When entries exceed the places you have, BWF runs qualifying rounds (regulation 12.1). At club level the same job is usually done by capping the field and keeping a reserve list, which is less elegant and takes an hour less.

Publish the order of play before anyone arrives, then hold one rule: a match is not finished until the result is recorded.

Most club badminton runs without umpires. The players call their own lines and one person at the desk owns the draw — which is exactly the bottleneck that turns a well-planned day into a slow one. A QR code per match opens the score panel for that match on a phone, so whoever is at the net enters the result and the next round is not waiting on you. Print them and tape one to each post.

Treat courts as scheduled resources rather than as something you allocate in your head. Enter the courts, a start time and a slot length, and let the schedule assign matches and flag the conflicts. In badminton that conflict check earns its keep faster than in any other sport: the same player drawn onto two courts at once is not an edge case when everyone plays three events.

The board follows the rules of whichever distance you chose. Set a game to 15 and the interval prompt moves to 8, the change of ends in the deciding game moves to 8, and the hard cap moves to 21 — the thresholds travel with the distance instead of standing where the 21-point game left them.

A knockout answers itself. A group stage needs a tie-break rule announced before the first serve, because two players level on matches won is the most common argument of a club tournament.

The conventional order is matches won, then games won and lost, then points won and lost, then the head-to-head result. Putting head-to-head first sounds fairer and collapses the moment three players are level in a circle.

Tables and brackets update as results are confirmed, so the standings are finished when the play is. If a running table would change how the last group matches get played, you can keep results hidden until the end.

One honest limit: tournament results do not export to CSV, in any sport. What you get is a public draw page and a live table that anyone can open on a phone — which is what the club actually asks for, but it is not a spreadsheet.