Magic Judges Forum / Judging Technology / TiebreakerJS – manage MTG tournaments with your smartphone

Johannes Kühnel · Feb. 2, 2014 11:38:46 AM

At our local Legacy playgroup we tend to have around eight to eleven players for tournaments. Each time one of us has to bring a Windows notebook to make the pairings and compute the tiebreakers. Sure, we could do it the hard way, make pairings and calculate tiebreakers by hand, but this is time consuming and annoying to do. Naturally, I figured there has to be an app for that in one of the app stores. Well, there wasn’t a single one specifically for MTG with the ability to compute the usual/official tiebreakers.

So I fired up my text editor and began to code such a program myself.

URL: http://tiebreaker.kraken.at
French: http://tiebreaker.kraken.at/fr/
Chinese: http://tiebreaker.kraken.at/cn/
Spanish: http://tiebreaker.kraken.at/es/

Features:

player management
pairing system
match reporting
tiebreaker calculation
tournament export

TiebreakerJS is designed for small tournaments (4-32 players), but could theoretically handle more than that. The pairing algorithm is still ‘work in progress’ and could mess something up. If you experience strange behavior, please leave a comment and provide detailed information (screenshots are helpful too).
This program is not a replacement for WER, if you need to run sanctioned tournaments! For those events TiebreakerJS will just act as a mobile solution to create pairings and compute tiebreakers. You'll have to enter the data into WER to report such events anyway.

The site should work on any device capable of handling (modern) web technologies like Javascript and HTML5. A current Android device or iPhone does the trick – as well as the respective tablets.

For now, the playerlist gets wiped with every reload, but you can add a parameter to the URL, to automatically add the specified players when loading the page:

http://tiebreaker.kraken.at/?players=Player 1,Player 2,Player 3,...

By clicking on “Save playerlist” the site will show you the URL, so you can save it as a bookmark and have a persistent playerbase.

Screenshots:

Tested on:

Windows 7 (Chrome)
Nexus 5

GitHub:
https://github.com/JohannesKuehnel/TiebreakerJS

Thanks to:
Fran Aguilera Barranco (Spanish Translation)
Zhaoben Xu (Chinese Translation)
François-Xavier Martin (French Translation)

Edited Johannes Kühnel (Sept. 2, 2015 07:52:03 AM)

Joaquín Pérez · Feb. 2, 2014 12:39:16 PM

I'll check it, great work man!! :)

Justin Rix · Feb. 2, 2014 09:04:44 PM

Played with it some tonight. Looks great! Already saved it to my phone's folder. (Iphone tested)

Edited Justin Rix (Feb. 2, 2014 09:05:21 PM)

Johannes Kühnel · Feb. 3, 2014 11:05:49 AM

Thanks, could you please check, if there is an icon when you add the site/link to your home screen?
Should look like this (1 minute MS Paint job, don't judge pls :D):

I know it works for Android, but I'm not sure if it's the same for iOS.

Anyway, if you guys have any suggestions on what I could implement, just tell me. :)

Originally posted by John Temple:

This is a really cool tool.
The only major problem I see is not being able to see standings prior to
the end of the tournament.

You see the points of a player on the pairings, but I could add this feature as well. I guess the next thing I will do is the possibility to go back in rounds to see who played whom.

Edited Johannes Kühnel (Feb. 3, 2014 11:17:59 AM)

Adam Zakreski · Feb. 3, 2014 03:16:08 PM

This is really good and much needed! Very clean and simple interface. We have a lot of smaller groups in our area who run regular tournaments without access to WER, so this will be a huge boon for them.

Feature requests:
- Ability to view/edit previous rounds if you make a mistake.
- Some way to save/export the results of all rounds so you can do post-event entry into WER. Even just a screen you can copy and paste from. Yes iPhones can do that now too ;)

Minor requests:
- Set total number of rounds
- Display results with Points/Matches Played/Win/Loss/Draw
- Randomized list of players for making draft pods

Chris Nowak · Feb. 3, 2014 03:41:33 PM

It's a little disconcerting to enter results of a match, and have the screen not reflect them.

Justin Rix · Feb. 3, 2014 07:30:54 PM

Yes, that appears on my home screen.

Vinicius Quaiato · Feb. 4, 2014 04:23:21 PM

I will try to use it on the next FNM. All that I want is a tool that runs on mobile (ipad or phone). I will give you some feedback. Next saturday I'll run a GPT, I'll try to use it (as a secondary tool).

Am I able to fork it on github or something like that?

Johannes Kühnel · Feb. 4, 2014 05:19:51 PM

Originally posted by Vinicius Quaiato:

I will try to use it on the next FNM. All that I want is a tool that runs on mobile (ipad or phone). I will give you some feedback. Next saturday I'll run a GPT, I'll try to use it (as a secondary tool).

I wouldn't fully rely on it, at least not in a GPT level sanctioned event. Anyway, you'd still have to write down pairings and results until I (or someone else) add the feature to view previous rounds or save/export.

Originally posted by Vinicius Quaiato:

Am I able to fork it on github or something like that?

Of course you can fork it. The HTML and Javascript are accessible by just looking at the page's source code. Just make sure to read and acknowledge the copyright notice (it's in the code).

Adam Zakreski
Feature requests:
- Ability to view/edit previous rounds if you make a mistake.
- Some way to save/export the results of all rounds so you can do post-event entry into WER. Even just a screen you can copy and paste from. Yes iPhones can do that now too ;)

Viewing previous rounds is the first thing I will add in the near future. Save/Export is also something I'd like to implement, once I figure out a nice way to do so and higher priority features are added.

Adam Zakreski
Minor requests:
- Set total number of rounds
- Display results with Points/Matches Played/Win/Loss/Draw
- Randomized list of players for making draft pods

First two are on my list. The last one will eventually find it's way into the site.

Chris Nowak
It's a little disconcerting to enter results of a match, and have the screen not reflect them.

You can click on the pairing again to see the result, but I agree, that the result should also be shown beside the pairing. I will add it in the future.

Justin Rix
Yes, that appears on my home screen.

Thanks. :)

Edited Johannes Kühnel (Feb. 4, 2014 05:25:03 PM)

Mark Brown · Feb. 4, 2014 05:30:19 PM

A couple of things to note.

Please only use this as an alternative to running events by hand. If you have access to WER in the venue you are running events, it makes no sense to use anything other than WER.

WER is the required software for reporting sanctioned events to Wizards. There is a potential for events to be invalidated if things are not managed properly. I would also check with your WPN rep about running events by hand if you do not have access to a computer to run WER. If they are happy for you to run events by hand without a computer then this is likely to be a suitable alternative should you only have access to a phone/tablet that you cannot install WER onto.

Johannes Kühnel · Feb. 4, 2014 05:37:43 PM

That's why I added the part about WER in the initial post. The intention behind the project was just “managing by hand is tedious and there's no Windows computer available”. Thanks for the info, though.

Anyway, this forum is great to get ideas and feature requests to improve the site. So thanks to you all! :)

Update:
Implemented the following requests:

set total number of rounds
display results with Points/Matches Played/Win/Loss/Draw
display entered results directly on the pairing screen

Update 2:
Added tournament export!

The file will look like this:

Players (5):
Johannes
Susanne
Yolo
Jürgen
Peter
——————————————-
Matches:
Round 1
Jürgen vs. Peter - 2/0/0
Johannes vs. Yolo - 2/0/0
Susanne vs. BYE - 2/0/0
Round 2
Johannes vs. Jürgen - 2/0/0
Susanne vs. Peter - 2/0/0
Yolo vs. BYE - 2/0/0
Round 3
Johannes vs. Susanne - 2/1/0
Jürgen vs. Yolo - 1/2/0
Peter vs. BYE - 2/0/0
——————————————-
Standings (Player - points / matches / wins / losses / draws):
1. Johannes - 9 / 3 / 3 / 0 / 0 - OMW: 0.5556, PGW: 0.8571, OGW: 0.5714
2. Susanne - 6 / 3 / 2 / 1 / 0 - OMW: 0.6667, PGW: 0.7143, OGW: 0.5952
3. Yolo - 6 / 3 / 2 / 1 / 0 - OMW: 0.6667, PGW: 0.5714, OGW: 0.6429
4. Jürgen - 3 / 3 / 1 / 2 / 0 - OMW: 0.6667, PGW: 0.4286, OGW: 0.5873
5. Peter - 3 / 3 / 1 / 2 / 0 - OMW: 0.5000, PGW: 0.3333, OGW: 0.5714

Edited Johannes Kühnel (Feb. 7, 2014 10:14:38 AM)

Johannes Kühnel · Feb. 8, 2014 05:49:45 AM

Sorry for the double post, but in addition to the updates mentioned in the previous post (pretty much all your requests/suggestions), I've also implemented a match history, where you can view past round and their results (no editing for now).

The site is now subject to the following license: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/deed.en_US

Edited Johannes Kühnel (Feb. 8, 2014 05:52:37 AM)

Jasper Capel · Feb. 20, 2014 11:20:53 PM

Great work Johannes! This tool is very convenient for non-sanctioned drafts :)

Johannes Kühnel · March 9, 2014 06:23:20 AM

I've added the code to a git repository on GitHub, if anyone is interested in forking or contributing.
https://github.com/JohannesKuehnel/TiebreakerJS

Edited Johannes Kühnel (March 9, 2014 06:23:48 AM)

Matthew Turnbull · March 10, 2014 10:03:26 AM

This looks great! I look forward to using this for running little sealed events when new events come out etc, having to use DCI #s for WER always was akward for that purpose.

Please keep the forum protocol in mind when posting.

TiebreakerJS – manage MTG tournaments with your smartphone

TiebreakerJS – manage MTG tournaments with your smartphone

TiebreakerJS – manage MTG tournaments with your smartphone

TiebreakerJS – manage MTG tournaments with your smartphone

TiebreakerJS – manage MTG tournaments with your smartphone

TiebreakerJS – manage MTG tournaments with your smartphone

TiebreakerJS – manage MTG tournaments with your smartphone

TiebreakerJS – manage MTG tournaments with your smartphone

TiebreakerJS – manage MTG tournaments with your smartphone

TiebreakerJS – manage MTG tournaments with your smartphone

TiebreakerJS – manage MTG tournaments with your smartphone

TiebreakerJS – manage MTG tournaments with your smartphone

TiebreakerJS – manage MTG tournaments with your smartphone

TiebreakerJS – manage MTG tournaments with your smartphone

TiebreakerJS – manage MTG tournaments with your smartphone