Frequently asked questions
The things you do not want to find out on the night.
Everything people ask about running a darts tournament with darttournament.app, with the answer. Question not here? Email support@dartstournament.app — it will probably end up on this page.
On the night itself
Does it score the legs, or do I only enter the result?
Only the result. darttournament.app does not score and does not keep a 501 count — the phone at the board takes the leg score at the end of a match, not every throw. Anyone who wants to score does it the usual way: on the chalkboard, or with a scoring app beside them.
That is a choice, not an omission. Scoring means somebody is tied to a phone for the whole match, and that is exactly what makes a night of darts drag. Entering a result takes two taps; scoring takes a whole match.
What if the venue wifi drops?
That depends on your plan, and it is exactly why the offline edition exists. In the cloud version every phone uses its own connection — usually just mobile data — so venue wifi is not even needed. If your own connection goes entirely, nothing can be entered for a while, but nothing is lost: every screen fetches the current state again as soon as it is back.
If you know in advance there is no usable connection, the offline edition is the way: a darts tournament without internet explains how the phones join and when to pick which edition.
What if the laptop crashes or the power goes?
After every change the whole tournament is written to disk, and earlier versions are kept — on an evening of sixty-odd matches that runs into dozens. You start it up again and carry on where you were; at worst you lose the last result that was tapped in.
The writing is done so that a half-written file cannot exist: it writes to a temporary file and swaps it in one go. An unreadable file is never overwritten, because it might be the only copy of half an evening.
Two phones submit at the same time. Does that break?
No. Every screen sends along which version of the tournament it was working from. If that is behind, the entry is refused and that screen fetches the current state first. Without that check, a phone showing a stale screen could overwrite somebody else's entry.
A wrong result went in. Now what?
Correcting it is normal, even hours later. The standings, the leg difference and the table are recalculated — they are never stored but always worked out, precisely so they do not drift after a correction.
On top of that you can undo up to twenty steps, including starting the knockout.
Can I change best-of once we have started?
Yes, per round, and mid-tournament too. Running late? Drop the quarter-finals from best of seven to best of five. Results already entered are unaffected: they are judged by the best-of that applied when they went in.
Someone turns up late, or drops out.
As long as the tournament has not started you can add players, remove them and move them between groups by hand. After that the draw is fixed — otherwise everyone else's fixtures stop adding up.
Setting up and drawing
How many players can take part?
From three — that is the minimum to fill a group. Below twelve you get a warning that it will be a small tournament, but nothing stops you. Upwards, the limit is your plan, not the software.
How are the groups drawn?
You give the group size you want — five by default — and the number of groups follows from it, adjusted until none comes out below three or above six.
Why five rather than four, and what comes out at every entry count from 12 to 32, is set out with a table on the group draw page.
How are the boards assigned?
With a queue, not a fixed schedule: a free board takes the first match in which both players are available. What that looks like on the night is at how it works, step three.
What if two players finish level?
The tiebreakers run in a fixed order, written out on the group draw page. If two players are still level after all of them, the screen says a sudden death is needed and you pick the winner yourself — that gets thrown at the board, after all.
Where groups are unequal in size it compares points per match, so a player from a group of six is not favoured over one from a group of five.
Can players from the same group meet in the first knockout round?
No, they are seeded apart — they have just played each other. How the bracket is topped up and where the byes go is on the group draw page.
Practical
What do I need?
A laptop, a projector or a large screen as a second display, and a phone per board. Nothing else: there is nothing to install and the phones do not download an app — they just open an address in the browser.
Do the players need accounts?
No. Only the organiser has an account. The phones by the boards and the big screen get in with the tournament code — on the night itself nobody should be standing there logging in.
Can I look at the results afterwards, or send them round?
Yes. The whole tournament exports to a file and loads back in later. That file is yours and works without an account, so even if you stop paying you can still look it up next year.
Can I use it for something other than darts?
Technically any sport where two players contest a number of legs works — table tennis, pool, snooker. But the wording, the round names and the best-of logic assume darts, so it will chafe here and there. For now we are aiming at darts.
Which languages is it in?
This site is in Dutch, English and German. The app itself is being translated — Dutch is there first because that is where it was built and tested. Want to know when the English and German versions land? Leave your address on the waiting list.
What happens to my players' names?
They sit on our server in the European Union, and nowhere else. We do not sell them, we do not use them for advertising, and there is no tracking code on this site or in the app. How long we keep them and how you have them deleted is in the privacy statement.
Question answered?
Put yourself on the waiting list and you will hear when it is usable. One message, nothing else.