Product Overview
Dr. Neau's Tournament Manager is a tournament management
system. It's mainly geared for poker tournaments, but could also be used for billiard tournaments, dart tournaments, etc.
The primary goal of this application is to streamline the
runtime administration of your tournament as much as possible.
This goal is accomplished in two ways:
- Presentation of critical tournament information to all
players
The application presents critical tournament information to
all players via its "console". Examples include:
- Current bet amounts
- Time remaining until the next round or break
- Bet amounts for the next level
- Current seat assignments
- Up-to-date payouts and current prize pool
- Live tournament results
- Current league standings
- Number of entrants, add-ons or rebuys
- Number of remaining players
- Chips and their values
Having this information constantly visible benefits your players as
well as yourself. For your players, it means they have access to the
information they need whenever they want it. For you, it means they
don't have to constantly ask you questions. That, in turn, means you
can spend time concentrating on other tasks...like how to extract more
chips from your opponent (if you also happen to be playing).
Do you have tables spread out among multiple rooms? The application supports a client/server architecture that allows remote systems to display the console...assuming the systems are connected by a network.
- Automation to streamline access to key information and
make decisions and assistance to streamline updates that data as needed
The application can be used to automate decision
making during your tournament and then carry out your tasks for you. Examples include:
- Table balancing: The application will notify you when it is
time to balance tables and actually do the balancing for you if you
like.
- Table consolidation: The application will notify you when it
is time to consolidate tables
- Prize pool calulation and payout distribution: The
application will automatically calculate the payout schedule based on
the state of the tournament using criteria you have set in advance.
- Chip-color up. The application will automatically let you
know when it is time to perform a chip-up.
- Hand timer: The application has a hand timer that you can pop
up on the console, if ever needed.
- Access to rules: Poker and tournament rules are at your
fingertips via the online help.
- Monitoring of rebuys and add-ons: If you limit players to a
certain number of rebuys or add-ons, the application will enforce
those rules so that you don't have to worry about keeping track.
- Bounty calculations: The application will prompt you for who
knocked someone out when they are eliminated and automatically
calculate all bounty payouts for you. Note: The application can handle
complex knockouts, such as "Angus, Malcom and Bon were knocked
out by Cliff and Phil".
- Round-robin match assignments
In addition to this primary goal, the application also has two
secondary goals:
- Streamline the preparation for a tournament
The application provides many tools to get you up and running as
quickly as possible so that you can start your tournament as quickly as
possible:
- Wizards - The tool provides wizards for various activites. Most important of those are creating new tournaments, creating new betting schedules and creating match structures.
- Player database - Rather than retyping players names for each new tournament, just add them from your player database.
- Reusable components - Components of tournaments can be saved as "reusable components" and easily added to any tournament, so that you don't have to keep creating the same artifacts over and over. Some examples of components include betting schedules, chip cases, payout schedules and table configurations.
- Detailed help - The application has extremely detailed and searchable help if you ever get stuck.
- Streamline the post-tournament work you need to do in
order to communicate results to the tournament participants
Many people like to post the results of their tournament on a website (either their own or a poker league website) or send results out in email.
The
application provides many facilities for exporting tournament and league information. This information can then be communicated to your players via whatever mechanism you desire.
This application is written in Java, which means that it will work on virtually any modern operating system, assuming the Java runtime is installed. For most people, that means either Windows or Mac-OS...but for some that also means Linux, Solaris, HP-UX, etc.