Badminton tournament software for doubles, singles and mixed — schedules that fit your courts.

A badminton tournament is a court-hours problem before it is anything else. A best-of-three rally-scoring match plus knock-up and changeover occupies a court for roughly 30 minutes, so each court clears two matches an hour and an eight-hour day gives you sixteen per court. Everything else follows from that one number.

Run it forwards and the entry cap answers itself. A 32-player singles draw played as straight knockout is 31 matches. Three such categories, men’s singles, men’s doubles and mixed, is 93 matches, which needs six courts to finish inside a day and simply does not fit on four. Either you add courts, cut a category, or shrink the draws.

Organizers usually discover this at 4pm with two rounds left to play. Doing the arithmetic in advance is the whole job, and it is why the tournament schedule maker starts from your court count rather than from your entry list.

Badminton’s scheduling problem is not shared with most sports: the same person legitimately appears in three draws. A club player might enter men’s singles, men’s doubles and mixed doubles, which means three separate brackets each independently think they can call that player to a court at 11:20.

Generate the three draws separately and you will produce clashes, not occasionally but systematically, because nothing in either bracket knows the other exists. Worth being plain about this: each category is its own tournament in Tournamyx, and the scheduler works inside one tournament at a time. It will not spot that your mixed semi-finalist is also due on court three in the singles. Sequencing the categories against each other is still your call, and the court table above is the tool for it.

The knock-on effect is idle courts. When a clash forces a match to wait, the court it was assigned to sits empty unless something else can be pulled forward, which is exactly the kind of shuffle nobody can do by hand while also running the desk.

Straight knockout sends half your entries home after one match. For a club open where people have paid an entry fee and travelled, that is a bad afternoon and a worse renewal rate. A plate, which is a second draw for first-round losers, roughly doubles the guaranteed play for a 32-draw at the cost of about fifteen extra matches.

Whether that fits comes back to the court table above: on eight courts it does, on four it does not. The alternative for smaller fields is group play, where boxes of four guarantee three matches each before a knockout stage, which is why club-level events with under twenty entries usually run round robin groups rather than a bracket.

For a full walkthrough of entry, categories and match-day running order, see the badminton tournament organizing guide.