Constructing fair round robin tournaments with a minimum number of breaks

Pim van 't Hof, Gerhard Post and Dirk Briskorn

Operations Research Letters, vol. 38, pp. 592-596, 2010.
[DOI][Preprint]


Abstract:

Given n clubs with two teams each, we show that, if n is even, it is possible to construct a schedule for a single round robin tournament satisfying the following properties: the number of breaks is 2n-2, teams of the same club never play at home simultaneously, and they play against each other in the first round. We also consider a fairness constraint related to different playing strengths of teams competing in the tournament.