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The Leaguevine Blog entries labeled with the tag 'tournaments'

Wisconsin Swiss 2011

Posted on June 13th, 2011 by Mark "Spike" Liu

Wisconsin Swiss in Madison, WI will be the first tournament to use Leaguevine's scheduler and score reporting to fully manage the tournament. Several tournaments have used it in the past as an aid, but Chris "Bus" Olig of Midwest Ultimate is the first to use its full functionality. By using this innovative score reporting system, absolutely everything will be taken care of using smartphones!

For players/captains/coaches, this means you will never have to walk back to tournament central to report scores. All of the score reporting will be done on your smartphone, and you will be expected to update the scores of your games multiple times per game. To update a score on your smartphone, visit m.leaguevine.com, create an account, and simply find and update your game. Leaguevine Mobile is a simple web application that runs in your browser and thus you do not need to download anything. As you and others update scores, you'll be able to see the live results coming in from other fields. Your schedule is posted on m.leaguevine.com as well. Because each round depends on the previous round's results, the schedule for the next round will be posted 10 minutes before game time. Leaguevine Mobile will work on almost any smartphone from mid 2009 or later. If no one on your team has a smartphone (iPhone, Android, Palm Pixie, Blackberry 6, Windows Mobile 7), please stop by tournament central before games start and we will find a solution for you.

For the tournament directors, this means they will never have to input any scores. Scheduling will be as easy as clicking "Add a round" once each round completes. 

The Wisconsin Swiss tournament format uses 5 rounds of a Swiss format then has bracket play with the seedings for the brackets determined by the Swiss games. The format is inspired by the popular Windmill Windup Tournament and the specifics for the Wisconsin Swiss Saturday scheduling can be seen on the Standings page. Players/captains/coaches do not need to know how the scheduling works because we will generate it automatically for you, but the information is there if you are curious. 

Here is the tournament format specific to Wisconsin Swiss:
  • All games to 13, win by 2.
  • Each team has one time out per half as well as a floater.
  • Games last 90 minutes, with 1 hour and 45 minutes between start times. Games will begin at 9:00, 10:45, 12:30, and 2:15 on both days.
  • The Soft cap is at 80 minutes and the hard cap is at 90.
  • Schedules for each round of play will be posted 5 minutes after all teams have submitted their scores. Because generating schedules relies on teams entering scores, please enter your scores as often as possible (preferably each point) at m.leaguevine.com and once a game is done, check the "Final Score" box when you submit it.
  • There will be 5 rounds of Swiss play. Four will take place on Saturday and the final round of Swiss play will take place on Sunday.
  • The teams ranked 1-8 after Swiss play will move onto the Swiss Bracket (1st place).
  • The teams ranked 9-16 after Swiss play will move onto the Sharp Cheddar Bracket (9th place).
  • The teams ranked 17-24 after Swiss play will move onto the Mild Cheddar Bracket (17th place).
  • The teams ranked 25-32 after Swiss play will move onto the Aged Cheddar Bracket (25th place).
  • Winners of each bracket will receive a wheel of cheese. The top three teams in the tournament will receive monetary prizes.
  • The schedule is located here: http://leaguevine.com/tournaments/13476/wisconsin-swiss-2011/swiss/games/
If you are attending the tournament, we hope you enjoy this swiss format and the mobile score reporting! Please let us know what you think. 
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College Nationals - I'll be There!

Posted on May 23rd, 2011 by Mark "Spike" Liu
I am extremely excited to see Leaguevine in action this weekend at College Nationals. This is always the most exciting tournament of the year and there are always a ton of fans who are avidly broadcasting updates from the fields. I decided today that I'll be one of them, and will be making the 15 hour drive out to Boulder, CO with a few Madison friends!

The biggest difference between the Leaguevine experience for this College Nationals versus last fall's Club Nationals will be the impact of Leaguevine Mobile. Over the past few months, I've been building and revising the Leaguevine Mobile web application based on both user feedback and my personal experience. Now, instead of a team or spectator needing to spend so much time and effort typing in the team names and scores of the teams playing, they can instead just use Leaguevine Mobile to generate these tweets automatically. The score can be changed with just a couple quick taps, and the user can focus more energy on actually describing what happened.

Based on the positive feedback I received from some new users during the Regional tournaments, I believe Leaguevine Mobile is ready to take on a larger workload at Nationals. I will be walking around the fields and talking to spectators to get more feedback on how they are enjoying the experience. I'm going to work my hardest to ensure that the folks following along at home can receive the best possible updates.

I've talked with many of you users over email and phone over the past several months, and am really looking forward to finally putting some faces to names. Feel free to shoot me an email at mark@leaguevine.com if you'd like to let me know you're also going to be at Nationals. I'd love to meet up with you and hear your feedback or simply hang out!

-Mark
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Huge College Open Tournament This Weekend

Posted on February 11th, 2011 by Mark "Spike" Liu
This college season is starting to get underway and the first event with tons of big names is this weekend in Florida. The tournament is called "Warm up: A Florida Affair" and you can read a nice preview of it over at Skyd Magazine.

Every team at this tournament has a twitter account so we should expect to get a real nice feed from the fields starting tomorrow. You can follow along on the tournament page on Leaguevine. 

I love seeing how many great teams are buying into this idea of real time updates, and it looks like this movement is picking up steam. This is the first tournament I know of that has every single participating team tweeting results. If you are part of an ultimate team, please consider joining up before your next tournament and adding to this new community! The more Ultimate players tweet, the more fun it is to be a fan.

Go Hodags!
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Survey for Tournament Directors

Posted on January 14th, 2011 by Mark "Spike" Liu
Leaguevine has been gearing up for the 2011 college season and has been gathering many feature requests from users and tournament directors. The two things that Leaguevine is focusing on most right now are:
  1. Making the lives of tournament directors as easy as possible.
  2. Making the fan experience as enjoyable and easy as possible.
There are a lot fewer tournament directors than there are fans, and thus if you are a TD, I would love it if you could help me out by taking this survey:

I will seriously consider any suggestions or feature requests you have. Thanks!

-Mark
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Just completed an Interview about Leaguevine

Posted on November 5th, 2010 by Mark "Spike" Liu
It has been 2 weeks since the official launch and I'm getting a bit of publicity for the site now! Skyd Magazine, which is set to launch in a few days, just interviewed me for a features story. After talking to one of the founders of the magazine, it sounds like an awesome project and they have a lot of people contributing to it. I'm definitely honored that they chose to interview me.

I'll be sure to post a link to the interview once it's up!

-Mark

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New Feature: Can add links to tournaments or teams

Posted on October 27th, 2010 by Mark "Spike" Liu
Users on Leaguevine now have the ability to add links to tournaments or teams! Each link can be specified as a certain type, such as 'tournament preview', 'photo album', 'team website', etc. When you are browsing tournaments or teams, you will find links associated with them. These links will also show up in other places you might expect, such as the homepage.

There are several motivations for this addition:

  1. This was the #1 feature request since the site launched last Thursday. Hardly anyone is using Leaguevine's feedback area, but plenty of users have been emailing me with requests like this! 
  2. Links on Leaguevine will be beneficial to people who want more exposure on their sites. Bloggers, Photographers, Webmasters or whoever wants to drive traffic to their site can add their url on Leaguevine and that link will show up in multiple places on the site and remain there indefinitely. I'm guessing this was the reason why it was the number 1 feature request. :)
  3. Leaguevine becomes a lot more useful as an information aggregator because now users can find more information about their teams or tournaments easier.
  4. It gives the non-twitter users more opportunities to contribute relevant information, which will hopefully help in building our user base.
I hope this is what you all were looking for when you requested this feature!
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The Site is Almost Ready for Nationals!

Posted on October 20th, 2010 by Mark "Spike" Liu
USA Ultimate Club Nationals is coming up in a week (October 28th-31st) and Leaguevine is just about ready for it!

So far I've still only told a limited number of people about this site. Those people are my beta testers, some people from Madison, and a handful of others who have expressed interest in this project. I really want to have Leaguevine working well before I expose it to the masses, so I've taken it upon myself to actually use it a lot first. While my beta testers pointed out some problems and offered suggestions here and there, only one of them actually added significant amounts of content to the site. By adding a lot of stuff myself, I have been able to see first hand what kinds of things became repetitive or annoying. I'm just about done improving these areas, and am really excited to see what the masses think!

Along the way, I've also made several friends who will be attending nationals and are enthusiastic about providing the Ultimate community with tons of updates from Sarasota. I'll be in contact with them throughout the tournament to ensure everything is working well and that their updates reach as many people as possible. We hope we can make this tournament (along with others) extremely easy to follow from your computer at home.

Stay tuned for more updates really soon!

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