Options for hosting a live euchre tournament

A couple of days ago someone asked how you might run a euchre tournament for 20 people. We here at the Euchre Universe gave it a little thought and figured it would make a good post to suggest ways you might do this. Here’s what we came up with.

Option 1 Random Blind Draw Single Elimination. In this type of tournament you put everyone's name in a hat and draw for partners. If you have 20 people at your tournament, that will leave you with 10 teams. Then follow a bracket system like this one and randomly assign people to a team number. Play the first round as a "best of 3" and then play the next 2 rounds as a "best of 5" tournament.

If you'd like to do a double elimination version try one of the other brackets at the site. For more or less players, you’ll need to create different bracket systems.

Option 2 Cut-throat option. In this type of tournament you are on your own and the object is to amass as many points as you can. Each person is randomly assigned a number. Then tables are made up of randomly assigned people. You play euchre for 2 rounds and keep track of the scores. The temporary partnerships each get the number of points that they receive as a team. After 2 rounds of dealing, everyone moves to different tables and gets paired up with new people. The object is to score as many points as possible. The winner is the person who has the highest score after a set amount of table rotations. For 20 people, you could probably do 4 or 5 rotations in an hour. This means you'd rotate about 9 times in a 2 hour tournament. There is no end to the games so people could theoretically score more than 10 points in a given rotation.

Here’s a euchre site that explains this option in more detail. I particularly like the “duck” and the “euchre bingo” ideas. And the idea of having a “ghost” player in the event of an uneven number of players is a pretty good one too. And at the Semi-Official Euchre site they have scorecards for this type of play.

Either system works well. Option 1 is better for the "pure" euchre players because it stays truer to the game. In the cut-throat version sometimes your partner might try to get your team euchred just to ruin your chances of winning.

But Option 2 is better for people who would rather take responsibility for whether they win or lose.

That’s what we’ve got for now. Good luck.