Barfly Tournament Format

What makes Barfly different than other Tournaments

• You play with different players in every match

• All teams are balanced in terms of skill level

• We try to make sure you play with and against everyone else (we call these “introductions”)

• Very little down-time between matches

• You don’t go home early when you lose - every person plays the entire day, win-or-lose

• Tournament champions are picked on “who wins the most” at each level, in each gender, etc.

• The vibe is “fun”, “friendly and “social”

History

The Barfly tournament format is the brainchild of Dave “db” Blickstein..

db helped operate a beach volleyball sports fantasy camp which brought fans together with the stars of the pro tour for a week of games clinics, tournaments and general fun.

One of the most popular parts of the week was pro/am games that allowed fans to play games with and against the pros. We set out to design a tournament format with the following and rather challenging goals:

• A highly social tournament, played at the beginning of the vacation that would introduce guests to each other and to the pros

• A truly competitive tournament that everyone had an equal chance of winning no matter what their experience level.

• A tournament that maximized guests court time with the pros

So he designed a tournament format where people change teams and opponents in every round to maximize the number of player “introductions”. To accomplish the goal of a tournament that everyone (of any level) had an equal chance of winning, teams pitted against each other would be balanced (of equal caliber); if one team had a female beginner, so would their opponent. If one team had a pro, the other team would as well.

In the Barfly format, By having teams play matches end at a fixed total of points. For example, (21 points total (12-9, 13-8, etc.) rather than first team to 21. Team-balancing also has highly-desirable effect of making of tending to make most matches very close (same amount of time) and… a lot of fun. Thus, when matches are played simultaneously, each court finishes at about the same time which minimizes times between games.

The winner basically the person who won the most points. There can be several winners such as “Best Overall Barfly” (most points of any player), “Best Female Barfly”, “Best Male Novice Barfly”, etc.

Barfly Tournament Director Software

The scheduling and scoring operations are far too time-consuming for humans to do. Accordingly, db wrote the “Barfly Tournament Director” software program to manage that automatically.

It’s worth noting that nothing about Barfly is exclusive to pickleball nor volleyball. It can (and has) been used for any team sport.