Each tournament consists of one or more stages. Each stage has one or more groups of teams.
---------------------
| Tournament |
---------------------
/ | \
/ | \
--------------- --------------- ---------------
| Stage 1 | | Stage 2 | | Stage 3 | ...
--------------- --------------- ---------------
/ | \ | \ \
/ | \
----------- ----------- -----------
| Group 1 | | Group 2 | | Group 3 | ...
----------- ----------- -----------
/ / / / \ \ \ \ \ \
T1 T2 T3 T4 T5 T6 T7 T8 ...
For example, 2002 FIFA World Cup tournament was played in five stages. The Preliminary stage had eight groups, from "A" to "H". Group "A" consisted of for teams (France, Senegal, Uruguay, and Denmark) etc. Text in parentheses corresponds to the elements of the above diagram.
While the following stages and groups within were known in advance, the teams that would make it to them were not.
To be able to describe the groups of such an "semi-defined" stage we need to refer to its teams somehow. The solution is to make up some team IDs now, and establish the correspondance to the real teams later, when there is enough information to do so (e.g. when the previous stage completes). In our example we can assign an ID of "S1-A-1" to the team at "1st place in group "A" of the Preliminary stage", "S1-F-2" to one at "2nd place in group "F" of the Preliminary stage" and so on.
Game schedule for a stage may not be known either, until a previous
stage completes. In libtour it is assumed that
are the only missing pieces of information for a following stage, and they can be determined by the tournament rules on the completion of the previous stage(s).
All other information needed for a tournament definition does not require a delayed computation and can be statically provided by the rules. The list below shows the most important items.
A team can be a member of more than one group. For instance, in an NHL
competition each team belongs to a conference and a division group at
the same time. Moreover, when a stage consists of several groups, it
is often convenient to view the combined results of all teams; such a
summary group can be automatically created by libtour.
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