Tournament format (foresee up to 6 hours)

For larger groups, and in particular if you can get a group of 16 players together, there's a way to make the scoring much less dependent on the quality of the cards you're dealt. For your reading comfort, abstraction is made from the math and the focus goes to the conceptual approach.

General setup of the tournament

Standardising the rules for all players is indispensable, especially if they have other habits. I typically go with the games that were described until level 1.0: trump suit contract (wait, ask, join, alone), Abundance, Misery, Troel, Open Misery and Solo. Doubling only occurs for Troel.

Evolution: In the tournament, 5 rounds are played. In between those rounds, the players switch position, but in a specific way so that everyone:

has the opportunity to sit at the table with each other player once: After all, you'd want to have the opportunity to meet everyone and have a chat.
will be scored exactly once against each of the other players (this is more complex but will be detailed in the scoring section).

In order to achieve this, each player will get a rotation schedule, explaining for each round which table he has to play on and in which seat he can sink his bottom (compass direction: N,E,S or W).

The beauty of this tournament system lies in the scoring: In one round, 5 hands are played and those hands are passed around (unchanged) between the 4 tables, making it possible to compare who did best for each hand of cards (see "relative scoring" below).

Playing games across multiple tables

As stated before, each game is played on 4 tables. It gets transferred between the tables in a duplicate board (see image). In these, the hands (each 13 cards) are kept separate for the 4 compass directions (N,E,S,W). You may start to understand why the compass direction of a table was introduced in the previous paragraph.

At the start of a game, a new board is taken and placed in the middle of the table, with the North direction towards the player sitting in the North position of the table.

Then each player takes out his hand of 13 cards and the bidding starts 1 player clockwise from the indicated dealer on the duplicate board. The screenshot is German, so "Teiler"=dealer. So for the screenshot's example, the East ("Ost") player will start bidding.

In the playing phase, it's important not to throw the cards on a pile. After all, the hands must stay as they are so that they can be put back in the board and played again at other tables. A good habit is that at the end of a trick, each player lays his card face down before him in longitudinal or lateral direction: longitudinal if he (or his team) made that trick, transversal otherwise. This way you're still able to count how many tricks you made at the end of the play.

When the game ends, each player puts back his 13 cards in the board in the recess of his compass direction (where he took them from). Typically 5 games (boards) are foreseen so that tables do not have to wait (long) when switching game. After all, with just 4 games each table will have to wait until another table finishes before they can start a new game.

Player rotation

In order to make the carousel system (moving of the 16 players in between rounds) trackable, it's convenient to assign a jersey number (1-16) to each player. This way, as an organiser you can prepare all the rotations before the tournament starts.

As indicated at the top of the page the rotation system is both of a social and competitive nature.

An example for say "player 2": Please refer to the bottom of the page for the rotation schedule. In round 1, player 2 plays E(ast) position at table 1 with players 1, 3 and 4. At the same time, for scoring he'll play against players 6, 10 and 14 who will play the same hands on the other tables in the E position. In round 2, player 2 moves to table 2 N(orth), plays with players 12, 8 and 15 and plays against players 1, 7 and 4. And so on.

Relative scoring

As an organiser you can compare scores as you like (rank, mini-Gauss, delta, ...), as long as you compare the players that played the same hand. So for scoring round 1 (if you use the scheme below), you'll compare players 1, 5, 9, 13 who all played the N hand and attribute a score to each. The same applies for the sets "2,6,10,14" - "3,7,11,15" - "4,8,12,16". After 5 rounds, each player will have been scored once agains each other player and by adding the individual scores you know the winner. Tip for the organiser: Don't underestimate the spreadsheet effort that will go into this: automate in advance.

What you should ask your players, when they write down their table scores, is to not only write the points, but also who was part of the played contract and how many over or undertricks there were (to avoid discussions or uncertainties afterwards).

As a player, make sure you read and understand the following: The components Round, Table & Game can be pre-printed on score paper by the organiser, but you will have to fill the Contract player(s) participating in the bid, the bid itself (contract & bid level) and finally the number of over- or undertricks that were made. If the contract has no over or undertricks possible, just use "=" for success and "!" for failure. Ok here we go with a few examples from the screenshot:

standard trump contract: Can you find R1, T3, 4, ES, 9S, -1? This means in round 1 at table 3, for game 4, East and South played a 9 Spades contract but failed by 1 trick (-1). It's always good to add the classical table score too (in this case 3, -3, -3, 3 for N, E, S, W respectively).
Abundance: In Round 1, on Table 3, game 5, player S bid Abundance and made it ("="), so Sarah scores +9 table-points there.
Misery: With the same deal of cards that Sarah (South) used to play Abundance, on another table (table 1) player North (John) bid Misery and won ("=").
Troel: Since the hands are played on each table, you can observe all "game 3" bids are "T" for Troel. Luke and Lydia at table 4 made the most tricks with the cards so they both will do well in the comparative scoring.

One last remark: An extra hint-by-example at how to understand these scores: Julie at table 3 may think that she's not doing well with a table-score of -2 for game 1. But when that game 1 is played at all tables, it appears that Carry on table 2 and John on table 1 got a worse score. So Julie's score for that game will be relatively good (f.e. if the score is attributed based on rank, which is a choice of the organiser).

Technical details for tournament organisers.

A standard rotation schedule for 16 players is given below (players get a number from 1-16). Note that player 1 will always stay at the same table and in the same position, this could be handy if you have a less mobile participant or if -as an organiser- you want to stay close to the kitchen for distributing drinks & snacks.

Compass: N E S W

Round 1 --- --- --- ---
Table 1: 1 2 3 4
Table 2: 5 6 7 8
Table 3: 9 10 11 12
Table 4: 13 14 15 16

Round 2 --- --- --- ---
Table 1: 1 5 9 13
Table 2: 2 12 8 15
Table 3: 7 3 10 16
Table 4: 4 14 11 6

Round 3 --- --- --- ---
Table 1: 1 6 10 15
Table 2: 11 7 13 2
Table 3: 14 9 3 8
Table 4: 16 12 4 5

Round 4 --- --- --- ---
Table 1: 1 7 12 14
Table 2: 6 16 2 9
Table 3: 3 5 11 15
Table 4: 8 10 13 4

Round 5 --- --- --- ---
Table 1: 1 8 11 16
Table 2: 10 14 5 2
Table 3: 12 13 6 3
Table 4: 15 7 4 9

Btw, to make life easy for your participants (and yourself), it's very convenient to hand them their personal schedule. F.e. Player 2:

Round 1, table 1, position East

Round 2, table 2, position North

Etc.

Enjoy!