Tournament nights

A draw, matches called to real tables, the prize fund out of the drawer, and a bracket on a screen in the room.

Can I run a pool tournament from my POS?

Yes. Enter the players, draw the bracket, and CoinOp calls each match to a real table on your floor, takes the entry fees through the till, works out the prize fund and pays it out of the drawer. A read-only bracket can be put on a screen in the room.

Switching it on

Off unless a venue asks for it. A place that never runs a tournament should not carry a tab it will never open.

The Cups settings page, with the on/off switch and the address of the wall screen — One switch, and the address of the bracket screen — which otherwise means knowing to type/bracket into a monitor nobody has a keyboard for.

Settings → Cups

Setting a night up

It is three steps, and the screen only shows you one at a time.

The tournament. What it is called, which game, and what it is played on — pick billiards and CoinOp will only ever offer you billiards tables.
The players. Anybody in the customer directory, added by name or phone number.
The money. The entry fee, anything the venue is adding, and how the fund is split.

Then draw it. Seed the field if you know who tends to win, or shuffle — which is the usual choice on a friendly night.

The draw

A twelve-player bracket on the director’s screen, with two results in and one match called to a table — Twelve players in a bracket of sixteen. The four who drew a bye are not shown as empty boxes with a dash — on paper a player with a bye simply appears in the round they actually start in, and that is what this does.

Once the night is running there is nothing on this screen but the bracket. Tap a match to put it on a table, start it, or write down the result; the winner moves across on their own and the next match is ready.

The bracket is the whole screen once the night is running.

Matches on real tables

A match is called to a table you actually have. Assigning one does not check anybody in — the table stays free until the match starts — so a pair can be called and walk over without the clock running on them.

What happens to the clock when it does start is the venue’s decision, per tournament:

Free. The table is not billed. The entry fee was the price of playing.
Out of the fund. The table time comes off the prize money.
The players pay. The table bills as any other table would.

The money

Entry fees are taken through the till like anything else, so they land in the day’s takings and on the Z report rather than in a tin behind the bar. The fund is the fees, less any rake the venue takes, plus anything the venue has added.

When the night finishes, the standings are worked out from the bracket and each place is paid out of the drawer — recorded, so the money that left the till at the end of a tournament night is accounted for like the rest of it. See The end of the day.

The screen in the room

The same bracket on a screen on the wall, scaled to fill the monitor — The same draw, read-only, scaled to whatever monitor it is on. No PIN, nothing to sign into, and it cannot change anything — a screen that reboots in the middle of the evening comes back correct with nothing to recover.

Open the address from the Cups settings page on any browser in the building. It picks up results within a few seconds. A venue running two nights at once can give each screen its own address, which the settings page offers when there is more than one running.

What it does not do yet

Single elimination only. Double elimination, round robin and leagues are not built, and a night that needs them is better run on paper than half-run here.