Microsoft Excel - I have 9 golfers playing 6 rounds of golf. One group of 4 players and one group of 5.

I have 9 golfers playing 6 rounds of golf. One group of 4 players and one group of 5 players. Is there a way I can make the pairings so each player plays with the other players an equal number of time?

Have you tried one of the tournament bracket templates in Excel?

http://www.vertex42.com/ExcelTemplates/tournament-bracket-template.html

Rob,

None of those templates seem to work or solve my problem. What i'm trying to solve is the following....

I have 9 golfers playing 6 rounds of golf. These 9 golfers will be split into two (2) groups.
One group will consist of 4 golfers and the other group will consist of 5 golfer.
I'm trying to figure out how I can re-arrange the players in both groups over the 6 rounds of golf where each player will play an equal (or close as) number of times with the other players.
Does this make sense?

Thanks!
Bill

Hello Bill,

I have looked at a similar problem and have found that the only way to get some sort of balance is to do it by brute force and write a macro to generate random groupings and count the playing combinations with some sort of parameter to stop the loop when a satisfactory combination is arrived at.  Off the top of my head I would say that there is no way that you will get equality with the numbers that you have.  I also wonder what course will allow you to play a group of five and why you would not consider three groups of three.

When I get a bit of time I will see if I can dig up the workbook that I used and see if it can be adapted for your purpose as it was based on maximum four players per group and as even group sizings as possible and only five rounds.

Regards

Harry

Thanks Harry.

Hello Bill,

I made some mods to my spreadsheet and the following seems to be the 'best' matrix that I could come up with.  There might be better ones but the run times could get extreme to find them.  In this one, everybody plays with the other eight at least once and doesn't play in the same group with anybody more than four times.

Day1 Day2 Day3 Day4 Day5 Day6
  E       D      G      B      B      D
  F       C       B      A      F      A
  A       E       F      C      C      E
  C       A      C      H      A      F
  H      H      E       G      I       B
______________________________________
  I       B       A       E      E      C
  G      F      D       D     G      H
  D     G      H       F      D       I
  B      I        I        I      H      G

Hope this helps.  If you want a copy of the spreadsheet, I would have to tidy it up quite a bit.

Harry