How to run a league.
What do you need to have a successful cornhole league?
First, there is no right or wrong way to run a cornhole league. There are fair and unfair ways to run a league. If you are going to have very skilled players with non-skilled or new players you may want to consider handicap. How are you going to calculate team scores? How do I break a tie? How do I schedule teams to play each other? Let's look at these questions one at a time.
How do I schedule teams to play each other?
Probably the most common way would be to have each team play each other team on different nights. This is called a round robin sort of play and is usually the most fair way to play each team. This leads to one additional consideration; how many nights will the league run? Here is an example: Let's say you have 12 teams signed up. Team 1 should play Teams 2 through Teams 12 with the possibility of a playoff at the end. If each team only plays one other team per night this would mean 12+ weeks of play. (12+ weeks because there is the handicap consideration. We will talk about this later.) 11 regular weeks plus 1+ weeks of playoffs. You don't really need to have the playoff week, but the playoff weeks help settle ties and creates a final true winner. If you have an odd number of teams then each team would have a bye week. You can shorten the weeks of play by each team playing more than one team in a night. So if you have each team play two other teams in a night you could get away with only 6 weeks of regular play. LeagueTrackerPro.com has a built in round robin scheduler and takes into account the number of teams played each night.
How do I calculate team scores?
One way to calculate team scores and effectively team ranks is to simply keep track of scores for each team. This isn't always the fairest way as if you have more skilled players/teams in the same league as non-skilled players/teams. You could add in handicap and we will add that later. LeagueTrackerPro.com uses a system based on bowling league scoring. Winning teams get a point for each game one and one point for winning the set. Example Team 1 is playing Team 2 three games to a match. Team 1 wins two of the three games and Team 2 wins the third game. Team 1 receives 2 points for the two winning games and a single point for winning the match. Team 2 receives 1 point for the winning game. LeagueTrackerPro.com also keeps track of points scored for each match to break ties.
What about handicap?
So here is the big question. How do I make it fair and get more people to play? This is where the magic really happens. Handicap can be tricky to get right. Where is the cut off and what percentage do I use? LeagueTrackerPro.com uses an 80% rule. Each time gets 80% of 24 to calculate the handicap. Why 24? Cornhole is usually scored to 21 to win and your normal game play is still to 21 LeagueTrackerPro.com pushes anything over 21 to 24 automatically to reduce handicap on the better teams and allow the less skilled teams more handicap. There are a couple other little details that LeagueTrackerPro does to calculate handicap that we would prefer to keep under wraps.
This is just one way to run a cornhole league. We would love it if you to try LeagueTrackerPro.com for you next league. To reiterate there is no right or wrong way to run a league. The idea is to be fair, have fun and make some new friends.