Twenty-five minute matches and sixteen tables.

A best-of-five to eleven takes about twenty-five minutes including the knock-up, and a club hall usually has eight to sixteen tables. That combination is unusual: most sports are constrained by venue time, and table tennis is constrained by almost nothing. It is why the international format — groups of three or four, then a straight knockout — is also the right format for a Saturday open.

The maths for thirty-two entries: eight groups of four is six matches per group, forty-eight group matches in total, then the top two from each group make a round of sixteen, which is fifteen more. Sixty-three matches, every player guaranteed three, and on sixteen tables the whole group stage is three rounds of table-time.

The same thirty-two entries as a straight knockout is thirty-one matches and gives half the field one match. When the format that guarantees three games costs you an extra hour and a half, there is no argument to have. Build it on the group stage + knockout generator.

The group stage runs itself. The knockout runs itself. What does not run itself is the twenty minutes between them, when eight group sheets have to be read, tiebreaks applied, sixteen names copied into a draw and the draw checked before anyone plays. On a busy day that is the single longest gap in the schedule, and it happens with every player standing around watching.

Groups of four in table tennis tie constantly — three players on two wins each is a normal outcome — so the tiebreak hierarchy is doing real work. Head-to-head resolves a two-way tie and resolves nothing in a three-way one, where it is circular by definition, so you fall through to games ratio and then points ratio. Publish that order with the draw, not at 1pm.

On Tournamyx the stages are chained: group tables recompute on every saved result, the same tiebreak rules apply every time, and the moment the last group match is scored the qualifiers are placed into the knockout automatically. The twenty-minute gap becomes the time it takes to call the first sixteen names.

The other thing that scales badly is result collection. Sixteen tables producing a result every twenty-five minutes is roughly forty results an hour arriving at one desk on paper, each of which has to be transcribed before any table is right. That transcription step is where the errors come from, and they surface at exactly the wrong moment.

Roles on Tournamyx are per tournament, so you can hand score entry to whoever is umpiring or to the players themselves without giving anyone the ability to edit the draw. Results go in from any phone at the table, and the group tables and bracket update everywhere at once.

Everything else follows from that: players check their own next match and table number on a public link that needs no login, rather than crowding the desk. If you want the paper as well — and most halls do — a live event exports print-ready group sheets and blank scoresheets per table as PDFs.