Category: FIR

Tournament Draw Process

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FIR always strives for consistent tournament quality across all FIR Racketlon events. This serves not only to set expectations of what kind of matches players can expect when entering tournaments, but also that appropriate ranking points are awarded.

One important aspect is that an Elite class is filled primarily with Elite players and does not contain a large number of truly „B“ players e.g. as a result of the tournament’s location or timing. This can be achieved for singles events by selecting a draw-size which results in a draw „cut-off“ having a relatively consistent World Ranking. For Mens A event, the cutoff World Ranking in the range 60-80, for Womens A events, generally with far fewer entries, a cutoff of around 20-25 is typical, as shown by the the cut-off graphs for all 2017 FIR tournaments.

Although the uppermost goal is to achieve the best possible player experience for all tournaments, this is often not possible without concessions or compromise, resulting in some players being disadvantaged. Sometimes the rules cannot easily be applied to exception cases and a subjective judgement call is necessary.

Our goal is nevertheless that the tournament draw process follows a rule-based, objective system as far as is possible. The main driving force is to set deadlines to ensure that the tournament draws and schedules can be made on time and in accordance with the rules. Especially with the new rule introduced in 2017 that Elite draws should be broadcast live, this demands a more rigid timeline with some advance planning, so that players are able to know when to tune in to Facebook. When the rules are not easy to apply, we strive for clarity on how to deal with it.

An equally important aspect is to ensure that decisions are taken on a neutral, unbiased basis, and consistently across all tournaments. This must be accompanied by the need for fairness towards the players, to avoid e.g. that some players are consistently forced into classes they are unhappy with, or that late entries are allowed by some tournaments but rejected by others.

Making a tournament draw can often be a very challenging process. In an attempt to facilitate it, the FIR Council has discussed and approved a Tournament Draw Process, which is now available on http://www.racketlon.net/content/tournament-support.

Your feedback is welcome – we will be happy to improve it further, where this is possible.

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World Tour 2018

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Next season’s World Tour calendar has been finalized. A lot of work have been put in to get the last few tournaments on the list, but we are happy to now announce a total of 14 World Tour tournaments plus another 2 challengers. There can easily be more challengers coming in 2018 as the deadline for applying for one of these is just 4 months prior to the tournament.

The Tour will as usual start in Vienna in the first weekend of the year. The City and Country Club in Vienna, which hosted the European Championships this year, will host the Vienna Classics. In February Swedish Open returns to Malmö including the first leg of the 2018 Champions League. This is followed only one week later by the Club La Santa Open in Lanzarote, Spain, hosted by Racketlon Denmark. April includes the traditional Czech Open and the first challenger (confirmed) challenger of the year, the Massachusetts Racket Masters in USA.

Two tournaments in Nussloch, Germany

In May the World Doubles Championships will be hosted at the popular venue of Racket Center in Nussloch. This will be hosted along with IWT Nussloch Open and will be a 4-day tournament. Thursday and Friday will be the World Doubles Championship and Saturday and Sunday will the IWT, which will only be a singles tournament. Nussloch will also host the traditional German Open like the many past years. Like last year the second leg of the Champions League will be hosted on the Friday of this weekend. Note that FIR and Racket Center Nussloch have decided to move it into start August instead of on the normal date at the end of July.

In between the two tournaments in Nussloch there are three stops on the tour, which will take us to Belgium, France and Latvia. Oudenaarde in Belgium is as always the host of the most popular tournament on the tour, the King of Rackets. In Paris the second (confirmed) challenger of the year, which will take place and Latvia returns for the third straight year with an IWT in Riga.

World Champs in Switzerland

The Team and Singles World Championships will take place in Vitis in Zürich, Switzerland. This venue last hosted the World Champs back in 2013 and is to date still the biggest racketlon tournament ever hosted. The Finnish Open in Helsinki will follow before the tour again goes to Malta for some sun in October. The tour will end in Austria with the World Tour Finals in Wiener Neudorf close to Vienna. Beneath a full overview of the 2018 FIR World Tour. See also fir.tournamentsoftware.com, where all the tournaments have been published.

 

Date Type Tournament Name Country Tournament Director Delegate
5-7.1 IWT Vienna Classics Austria Fabian Hofmann Radu Ionescu
23-25.2 IWT + CL Swedish Open Sweden Markus Borg Kresten Hougaard
3-5.3 IWT Club La Santa Open Lanzarote, Spain Kresten Hougaard Luke Barnes
20-22.4 IWT Czech Open Czech Republic Svatopluk Rejthar Kirsten Kaptein
28-29.4 CHA Massachusetts Racket Masters USA Andy Stenson TBC
10-11.5 WC dbl WC Doubles Germany Matthias Zimmermann Hans Van Daele
12-13.5 IWT Nussloch Open Germany Matthias Zimmermann Hans Van Daele
1-3.6 SWT King of Rackets Belgium Hilde van Onderbergen Morten Jaksland
29.6-1.7 CHA French Open France Josselin Gadé Johnny Bispham
13-15.7 IWT Latvian Open Latvia Zigmars Puikevics Johnny Bispham
3-5.8 IWT + CL German Open Germany Matthias Zimmermann Kresten Hougaard
22-26.8 WC WC Singles Switzerland Esther Dübendorfer J. Bishop / R. Middleton
22-26.8 WC WC Teams Switzerland Esther Dübendorfer J. Bishop / R. Middleton
14-16.9 IWT Finnish Open Finland Poku Salo TBD
12-14.10 IWT Malta Open Malta Duncan Stahl Kirsten Kaptein
23-25.11 SWT World Tour Finals Austrian Open Austria Fabian Hofmann Richard Middleton

Kresten Hougaard
FIR President

EUR 10 surcharge for tournament registration in last month

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Don’t forget about the new rule allowing the Tournament Director to charge players an additional EUR 10 if their first registration was within the last 4 weeks before close of registration. As we already reported on 17th October, the objective of this new rule is to improve the visibility of players participating in the tournament, not as an additional source of revenue for Tournament Directors (though this may well be a by-product).

Given the timing of this new rule, Vienna Classics has generously allowed this deadline to be extended from Monday 27. November to Monday 11th December. If you were thinking of playing Vienna Classics next month, right now would be an excellent time to go online and register, to make sure you don’t have an unpleasant surprise at the tournament desk on arrival.

As for the following tournaments, please don’t expect this extension to be granted again, as the new Regulations should be published in January for all to see. Why wait? Just register!

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EUR 10 surcharge from 2018 for delaying tournament registration into last month

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Every tournament director has had to deal with the problems behind this curve, sometimes feeling the nervous uncertainty gnawing away in the stomach, whether there will also be financial suffering as a result. In this example, with 32% of the player registrations happening in the final week before the close of registrations, it can also be tricky to know how many courts to book and from when matches will start in some categories to name but two issues to handle. But the real problem is the impact it has on the number of player registrations. We almost all check out who else will be playing before we sign up, but there are many, who even base their decision to participate at all, on who else will be there. Finding a doubles partner can also be much easier, when there is a bigger pool to choose from early on.

FIR hopes to soften this issue from 2018 by introducing a EUR 10 tournament surcharge per player when registering in the last 4 weeks. The main goal is to serve as an incentive for players to at least put their name down early, without it necessarily costing them any more. Changes of registration, or withdrawals during these last 4 weeks will not incur a surcharge. So, you can decide on the last day to enter a doubles event or swap from +55 to +50, for example, but you had better make sure your name is on the list by Sunday evening a month before registrations close at the latest!

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EC: new teams format

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A staggering 24 teams have entered the 2017 European Racketlon Team Championships, representing 13 different nations.  To cope with such an unprecedented level of entry a revolutionary new tournament format has been developed.  We hope that this guide will take you through this new format and answer all your questions, allowing everyone to settle back and enjoy a thrilling Racketlon team championships.

Let’s Meet the Teams

The 24 teams have been split over three divisions, with the new added twist that teams can be promoted/relegated between the divisions (more on that later).  The top division is the Championship, which will see the best 8 teams in Europe compete for the crown of European Team Champion, a title currently held by Denmark after their victory in Prague.  In Vienna these 8 teams are: Austria 1, Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, Germany 1, Great Britain 1, Sweden 1 and Switzerland 1.

Division 1 is the second tier, in previous events this has been represented by the Amateur event, with Sweden 2 the defending champions from Prague, however in this new format there are a host of new teams and new prizes on offer. The teams in Division 1 are: Austria 2, Belgium, France, Germany 2, Great Britain 2, Great Britain 3, Switzerland 2 and Sweden 2.

Division 2 is the third and final tier to our new league structure, and will serve as the entry point for new nations to Team Racketlon in both this and future competitions.  In Division 2 there are our final 8 teams: Austria 3, Austria 4, Germany 3. Great Britain 4, Hungary, Slovenia, Switzerland 3 and Turkey.

Match Format

Each of our 3 divisions will be split into 2 groups (A and B) of 4 teams.  Each team will play the other teams in their group once in the standard 5 player team format (2 x men’s singles, 1 x women’s singles, 1 x doubles) with 11 up scoring.  Once these matches have been played we will have the group standings for both groups in the three divisions.

It is now that it might get a little bit complicated!  In each division, the winner of Group A will play the runner up in Group B (A1 vs B2, and vice versa, B1 vs A2).  These are called the promotion play offs.  This is replicated at the bottom of the groups, so third in Group A plays fourth in Group B (A3 vs B4 and B3 vs A4), called the relegation play offs.  After these play off matches, there is a final round of matches.  The winners of the divisional promotion playoffs will play the losers of the relegation play offs in the division above.  The victors of these promotion/relegation matches will play in the higher division in the 2019 European Team Championships with the losers playing in the lower division.  In our example below, the teams in bold have won, so the

 

Division 1 Relegation Play Offs                                                 Division 2 Promotion Play Offs

Austria 2 vs Great Britain 3                                                         Slovenia vs Turkey

Germany 2 vs Belgium                                                                 Hungary vs Switzerland

 

Promotion/Relegation Play Off

Austria 2 vs Turkey

Belgium vs Hungary
In our example, with bold teams winning, Austria 2 stay in Division 1, but Belgium are relegated to Division 2 and Hungary promoted in their place.

For the top two teams in the Championship group, they play the Championship play offs, in the same format (A1 vs B2 etc), with the two winners of the Championship play offs playing the final to determine our European Team Champion and the two losers of the play off playing for the Bronze medal.  Similarly, the teams in the third and fourth places in Division 2 will play out for 5th to 8th place as there is no relegation from the bottom Division.

Caveats

There are some caveats to the new structure.

1) A second team is not allowed in the Championship division.  Should a second team (i.e. Germany 2) win the Division 1 Promotion play off, then the 7th placed team will not be relegated in the Championship will not be relegated.  An additional match will be played to determine who is the 7th place team in the Championship.

2) No more than two teams from one nation in Division 1.  For example if Great Britain 4 win a Division 2 Promotion play off, then they cannot be promoted and the 7th placed team in Division 1 will not be relegated.  Similarly, if Great Britain 1 are relegated from the Championship, then Great Britain 3 will be demoted to Division 2 for the next tournament, regardless of their finishing position in Division 1.

Conclusions

This new format is exciting, but we are aware, potentially a little confusing.  What we can assure everyone is that the new format is designed to help develop our team championships to include as many nations as possible.  All teams will enjoy 5 matches with no match representing a “Dead Rubber”, there will be something to play for in every single match!
James Pope
UK Racketlon