How to organise a table tennis tournament

A tennis organiser books courts and a badminton organiser worries about rest between a player's three events. Table tennis has neither problem in the same shape. One entrant plays one event, matches are short, and the constraint that actually decides whether your day works is blunt: how many matches one table can swallow between the doors opening and the hall closing.

Start from a single match. Best of five games to 11, at club standard, runs 20 to 30 minutes including the knock-up and the one-minute interval players are entitled to between games (ITTF 3.4.4.1.1). Add two or three minutes for players leaving, the umpire writing the card and the next pair arriving. Call it 25 to 35 minutes of table time per match.

Format	Typical match	Matches per table per hour
Best of 3 to 11	12–18 min	3
Best of 5 to 11	20–30 min	2
Best of 7 to 11	30–45 min	1.5

Those are planning numbers, not rules. What follows from them is not a guess: tables × hours × rate = matches your day can hold. Six tables, seven playing hours, best of five gives you roughly 84 matches. Every draw decision below has to fit under that number, and if it does not, you change the format rather than hoping the day speeds up.

No other racket sport gives an organiser this. Under ITTF 2.15, if a game has lasted ten minutes and fewer than 18 points have been scored between the two players, the expedite system comes in. From that moment each player serves for one point in turn, and if the receiver makes 13 correct returns in a rally, the receiver scores the point. Once introduced it stays for the rest of the match (2.15.6).

Read that as a scheduling instrument rather than a curiosity. It means a defensive attritional match cannot quietly eat forty minutes of your table: the rulebook steps in at ten minutes of a single game and forces the rallies to end. The 18-point clause matters too — a game that is already at 10-8 is moving fast enough, so expedite is not introduced.

Two things follow for the schedule:

• Your worst case is bounded. Even a match that goes the distance with slow games has a ceiling the umpire is obliged to enforce, and after the first expedite game the rest of the match runs quickly.
• If your tournament is short of time, you may ask both players whether they want expedite early. ITTF 2.15.1 allows it at any time when requested by both players or pairs — it is not only a referee's tool.

Tell your umpires before the first round that you expect them to time the games. An umpire who does not start a watch cannot apply the rule, and the whole guarantee evaporates.

Most club organisers reach for groups first, because a knockout sends half the entry home after one match. The ITTF regulations point the other way for individual events: 3.7.4.4 says individual events proper are played on a knockout basis, while team events and the qualifying rounds of individual events may be played on either a knockout or a group basis.

That is worth reading twice. In the international model, groups are the qualifying stage; the event proper is a bracket. Your club Sunday is not bound by international regulations, but the structure is a good one to borrow, because it answers the complaint about knockouts without abandoning them: everyone gets three matches in the group, and the bracket then decides the title.

Shape	Matches	What entrants get
Knockout, 32 entries	31	One match minimum, five for the winner
Round robin, 8 entries	28	Seven matches each
8 groups of 4 → knockout of 16	48 + 15 = 63	Three matches minimum, seven for the winner
Knockout with a consolation round	31 + 16 = 47	Two matches minimum

The consolation round is worth knowing about because it is cheap. JudgeMate builds one extra round for the first-round losers, which turns a one-match day into a two-match day for the half of the field that goes out first, at a cost of sixteen matches on a 32 draw. It is not a full plate event — one round, no more.

ITTF 3.6.1.1 is the rule that decides your draw size: the number of places in the first round proper shall be a power of two. Twenty-three entries means a draw of 32 and nine byes. There is no rounding, no group of three squeezed in at the top.

Byes are not scattered at random. 3.6.1.2: byes shall be distributed as evenly as possible throughout the first round, being placed first against seeded places, in seeding order. So the first bye goes to seed 1, the second to seed 2, and so on down the seeding list. This is the same instinct as every other federation: the players you protected by seeding are the ones who get the free first round.

Seeding numbers are where table tennis parts company with its neighbours. 3.6.2.2: the number of entries to be seeded shall not exceed the number of entries in the first round proper. A 32-place draw may carry up to 32 seeds. Tennis stops at 16 no matter how large the draw; badminton caps at 32 and ties the count to the number of entries. Table tennis ties it to the draw, and in practice you seed as deep as your ranking list is trustworthy.

Placement follows 3.6.2.3, and it is a familiar pattern:

Seed	Where it goes
1	Top of the first half
2	Bottom of the second half
3–4	Drawn between the bottom of the first half and the top of the second
5–8	Drawn among the bottom places of odd quarters and the top places of even quarters
9–16	The same pattern across the eighths
17–32	The same pattern across the sixteenths

Only seeds 1 and 2 have a fixed home. Everything below is drawn among the permitted places, which is why an ITTF draw is a public ceremony rather than a spreadsheet output.

If you run groups, the ITTF table works differently from almost every other sport, and the difference is deliberate. 3.7.5.1: two match points for a win, one for a loss in a played match, and zero for a loss in an unplayed or unfinished match.

The point of the one is to separate a player who turned up and lost from a player who did not turn up. In a three-points-for-a-win system those two are indistinguishable, and a walkover in the last round can quietly reshuffle a group. Under ITTF they cannot.

The tie-break chain (3.7.5.2) uses only the matches between the tied players, in this order: match points, then the ratio of wins to losses in games, then in points. If players drop out of the tie at any step, 3.7.5.3 says you exclude their matches and recalculate among those still level. If nothing separates them, 3.7.5.4 settles it by lot.

One scheduling detail hides in 3.7.5.5 and it is genuinely useful: the last match of a group should be between the players ranked 1 and 2 in the group if one qualifies, or between 2 and 3 if two qualify. Order your group fixtures that way and the decisive match is the one your spectators are still there to watch.

What JudgeMate does today, stated plainly: the group table defaults to three points for a win and zero for a loss, in the same points mode a football league uses. Table tennis has no draws, so the ordering is usually identical — but the numbers on screen are not ITTF numbers, and a withdrawal mid-group can change the order. If you want an ITTF-exact table, switch the draw's table to set mode and set the three values to 2, 0 and 1 in the category creator. The tie-break chain in set mode is set ratio then small-points ratio, which is 3.7.5.2 in the same order.

The creator asks for a sport and a name, and nothing else is mandatory. What matters for table tennis sits in the draw settings:

Singles or doubles. Table tennis defaults to singles, because that is what the discipline says the side is. Switching to doubles changes the side to a pair and unlocks the rotation formats — americano and mexicano — which only make sense when four people share a table.

Points per game and games to win. Two dropdowns: 11, 15, 21 or 25 points, and 1, 2 or 3 games to win. ITTF sanctions 11 today and best of any odd number of games (2.12.1), so best of five is 3 and best of seven would need a fourth option we do not offer. The longer distances are house formats, and the scoreboard now moves every dependent threshold with them — the single-point service change lands at one below the distance, and the change of ends in the deciding game at half of it.

Tables as resources. The scheduler takes a list of resources and a slot length, and tables are one of the archetypes it knows. Name them Table 1 to Table 6, set the slot to the match length you budgeted, and it lays the round out across them.

A referee QR per match. Each match carries its own link. Hand it to whoever is umpiring that table and their phone becomes the scoreboard for that match only.