MamboFats
Active Member
This is nice ... a place to tell a story or 2 ...
In the beginning of my pool hobby, I was in a small club and knew about how a tournament was run, how a competition was to be organized, how to raise funds to accomplish that. After a few years in the club I got elected president ... big mistake !!! I changed my life completely.
Soon after I got in the regional federation, got president after a few years. Got a seat in the national federation, got president after a few years and got to be Belgian Team Captain on the European Championships.
I was club president for 18 years, regional president for ±10 years, national president for 2,5 years. I learned a lot about ... politics, envy, jealousy, helplessness ... but also who is your friend. In the past 20 years there are still a couple of guys and gals for whom I'll run into a burning building.
Over all those years I organised, hosted and ran club tournaments, regional competition and tournaments and national tournaments. But "I" means "WE" in this last sentence. I had good friends, colleagues and helpers on 99% of the events. Some years back, me and my best friend started counting the number of tournaments we were tournament director (a lot of times we worked together, to lighten the workload): we stopped counting at 800...
In the beginning, we used a pîece of paper and drew a simple Single KO chart, or a double KO chart. We got confused a lot of times, when we had to put a losing player in the winner's side to the correct place in het loser's side of the chart. Until we got our hands of the excel files used by the EPBF. From then on we were never confused anymore.
These xls-charts were to be filled in manually.
In 2011 I met Cakti Aswan, who was then the organiser and tournament director of the Longoni Benelux Open. I visited the tournament and saw him manually filling in a double KO chart in graphical program (I think it was Adobe Illustrator). I asked him: why? Because I do graphic design and that's the program I know. Every round he printed new sheets to put up ... I told him I could make his charts in Excel, easy to fill, nothing much to think about ...
And at that time I somewhat of math-lover and got into VBA programming for Excel. I started to automate the charts in Excel and over the course of 3 to 4 years I kinda perfected my charts and system. In just one xls-file I had player registration, the draw (with or without seeding), automatic start/stop and time registration of the match, automatic print-out of match sheet for the players to fill in. And in the last version I even had the headshots of the players on their match sheets.
In 2012 I was tournament director for the next edition of the Longoni Benelux Open and the year after we moved the tournament from Belgium to Rotterdam,the Netherlands in a venue with 20+ tables. We had 200+ participants, including all the greats of Europe: Niels Feijen and Nick Vandenbergh, Tony Drago, Daryl Peach, Stephan Cohen, Huidji See, Oliver Ortmann, Andreas Roshkovsky, Joshua Filler, Reda Belhaj, Ralf Souquet and many more.
This last version of my fully automated excel tournament chart I used in september 2015 at the Italy Open in Milan as part of the World Games 2015. That tournament was won by Eklent Kaci, I think it was his first international title in 9ball. Then, he was still a kid, but what a player.. I had the time to watch to final: a fabulous player who has proven himself by now.
In 2015 cuescore.com got online and has been a very fun tournament system to use, I saw no need for further use of my xls-files (except when there's no internet connection)
The fun part of that is : cuescore.com has almost the exact same layout as the dashboard on my xls-file.
In the beginning of my pool hobby, I was in a small club and knew about how a tournament was run, how a competition was to be organized, how to raise funds to accomplish that. After a few years in the club I got elected president ... big mistake !!! I changed my life completely.
Soon after I got in the regional federation, got president after a few years. Got a seat in the national federation, got president after a few years and got to be Belgian Team Captain on the European Championships.
I was club president for 18 years, regional president for ±10 years, national president for 2,5 years. I learned a lot about ... politics, envy, jealousy, helplessness ... but also who is your friend. In the past 20 years there are still a couple of guys and gals for whom I'll run into a burning building.
Over all those years I organised, hosted and ran club tournaments, regional competition and tournaments and national tournaments. But "I" means "WE" in this last sentence. I had good friends, colleagues and helpers on 99% of the events. Some years back, me and my best friend started counting the number of tournaments we were tournament director (a lot of times we worked together, to lighten the workload): we stopped counting at 800...
In the beginning, we used a pîece of paper and drew a simple Single KO chart, or a double KO chart. We got confused a lot of times, when we had to put a losing player in the winner's side to the correct place in het loser's side of the chart. Until we got our hands of the excel files used by the EPBF. From then on we were never confused anymore.
These xls-charts were to be filled in manually.
In 2011 I met Cakti Aswan, who was then the organiser and tournament director of the Longoni Benelux Open. I visited the tournament and saw him manually filling in a double KO chart in graphical program (I think it was Adobe Illustrator). I asked him: why? Because I do graphic design and that's the program I know. Every round he printed new sheets to put up ... I told him I could make his charts in Excel, easy to fill, nothing much to think about ...
And at that time I somewhat of math-lover and got into VBA programming for Excel. I started to automate the charts in Excel and over the course of 3 to 4 years I kinda perfected my charts and system. In just one xls-file I had player registration, the draw (with or without seeding), automatic start/stop and time registration of the match, automatic print-out of match sheet for the players to fill in. And in the last version I even had the headshots of the players on their match sheets.
In 2012 I was tournament director for the next edition of the Longoni Benelux Open and the year after we moved the tournament from Belgium to Rotterdam,the Netherlands in a venue with 20+ tables. We had 200+ participants, including all the greats of Europe: Niels Feijen and Nick Vandenbergh, Tony Drago, Daryl Peach, Stephan Cohen, Huidji See, Oliver Ortmann, Andreas Roshkovsky, Joshua Filler, Reda Belhaj, Ralf Souquet and many more.
This last version of my fully automated excel tournament chart I used in september 2015 at the Italy Open in Milan as part of the World Games 2015. That tournament was won by Eklent Kaci, I think it was his first international title in 9ball. Then, he was still a kid, but what a player.. I had the time to watch to final: a fabulous player who has proven himself by now.
In 2015 cuescore.com got online and has been a very fun tournament system to use, I saw no need for further use of my xls-files (except when there's no internet connection)
The fun part of that is : cuescore.com has almost the exact same layout as the dashboard on my xls-file.