What this builds
Croquet England Regulation F4 describes a Swiss played as a consolation for a single-life knockout, "which players enter as they are eliminated from the main event… credited with their record in the main event". That last clause is the format rather than a setting on it: the main draw's results count towards the consolation's standings, which is what makes a twenty-player consolation rankable on its own games at all.
Setting that up by hand is three competitions, two handovers, a carry-across and a bracket drawn on reserved seats, across four sections. Progressive Swiss asks for the same answers in one pass and writes them in the order they depend on each other. It sits in How will they play? on Format, in regulation order at F4 — the list you read when deciding how the event runs — and the walk-through opens there, in the competition you chose it from. That competition becomes the ladder's main knockout.
Nothing it writes is locked. It uses the same controls the sections use, so afterwards the competitions are edited on Format, the handovers on Pathway, the draws in Knockout setup and the match formats in Scoring settings — as if you had built it by hand.
The button appears while the event has no handover and no bracket. Once either exists, the ladder is already being authored somewhere else and this stands down.
Do you have your field?
The first question, because it is the only answer that changes what can be built. A knockout's size and its seeds come from its entrants, so:
- With a field — the main draw is built in the same pass, seeded on dGrade.
- Without one — everything else is still built: both competitions, both handovers, and the Swiss knockout's reserved seats. The main draw becomes the one job left, and the Pathway carries it.
Either way the event is exactly as far as you got. Every answer is saved as you give it — there is no final Build step holding your work — so stopping part way leaves a real, valid, partly built ladder rather than nothing. Step out to the manual controls whenever you want more control over the next part.
The main event
Its name, and its match format. An existing competition is adopted rather than duplicated — renaming it here renames it everywhere — and it is set to knockout.
Match format applies to every round to start with. Rounds that differ (a best-of-3 from the semi-finals) are set per round, per bracket, in Scoring settings once the draw exists.
How many are seeded? appears only when there is a field. Blank seeds everyone, top to bottom on dGrade. A smaller number seeds that many and draws the rest beneath them. The draw step sits under it: Lock the field and the round and then Make the draw once that round is published, whenever suits you; Draw now instead takes the latest round without locking, and Announce a time… locks to a chosen moment (see Draw record). Save and draw it waits until the draw has been made.
Do round losers keep playing? appears with a field, and only while the draw is still to be built — a playoff is fed by the main draw's rounds, so it can only be drawn alongside them. It is the same question, in the same words, as Knockout setup asks for a knockout built by hand.
| Answer | Builds |
|---|---|
| No — just the draw | Nothing beyond the main bracket. It decides 1st and 2nd; everyone knocked out plays on in the consolation. |
| 3rd-place playoff | One extra bracket, drawn now, its two seats fed by the semi-finals as they finish. |
| Full placement (Bowl & Shield style) | Each round's losers drop into their own bracket — 3rd/4th, 5th–8th, 7th/8th and so on — until every player has a place. |
The brackets are drawn empty, on loser feeds rather than entrants, and fill themselves as the main draw's results go in. Beaten players still enter the consolation as normal: a losing semi-finalist with a 3rd-place playoff has both that game and their Swiss games to play, unless barred from the cut. Full placement adds roughly as many matches as the main draw has itself — a sixteen takes 15 matches and its placement brackets 17 — on top of the same players' consolation games.
Where do the byes go? appears with a field short of a power of two, so the draw has byes to place. It is the same question, and the same two answers, as Knockout setup asks — Regulation F1(c)(3)(C) makes it the Tournament Manager's, "but consistently for an entire draw". Spread evenly is the default and is every draw made here so far. Paired up groups the byes so two of them meet in the second round and both players start a game at once, which the regulation describes as leaving "at most one 'hanging bye'". The question counts it out for your own field first — "20 players in a draw of 32, so 12 byes. Spread evenly, 4 players have nothing they can start. Paired up, no player has." Pairing needs unseeded rows to draw names onto, so it is offered while at most half the draw is seeded; the note under it says the number.
Once the draw exists this question is gone from the screen, because the answer can no longer be acted on here. A playoff is added afterwards in Knockout setup as a new bracket seeded from Losers/winners of a bracket.
The consolation
Its name, how it pairs, its match format, and who is in it.
- Flexible Swiss (Reg F5) — no rounds; players are paired whenever a lawn frees, and they need not have played the same number of games. This is the one that copes with players arriving throughout the event.
- Swiss (Reg F3) — fixed rounds, everyone plays every round. Regulation F4 is written this way; a round cannot be drawn until its field is settled.
The consolation's players are ranked on their full record — its games plus the ones credited from the main draw — wherever a rank is taken: the qualifying table, and the pairing. Regulation F4 enters players "credited with their record in the main event", and F5 ranks the group it is about to pair on the percentage of games won in the event so far; the credited half is part of that percentage.
Who is in it?
Asked only when the main draw already has a field — with no players yet there is nothing to put in, and the last screen carries it as a thing left to do instead.
- Everyone, from the start (the default) — the whole field goes in resting. Nobody is paired until you mark them Ready on the Swiss board, so a player knocked out is already there to be made Ready, and so is one still in the draw with an hour to fill while they wait on their next opponent. That second case is the one no handover can serve: they have not lost anything yet.
- Add them as they lose — it starts empty. The Swiss board lists everyone the main draw has knocked out who is not in yet, and one press adds them; see Arrivals.
Either way they arrive resting, and marking them Ready is what says this player wants a game now. That is the switch the whole consolation turns on: being in it is not the same as asking to play.
Minimum games starts at none here, where a Flexible Swiss set up on its own starts at 5. F5's floor stops a player winning one game, stopping, and finishing on 100% in a pool where everyone had the same chance to play. A consolation is exactly the case where they did not: its players arrive as the main draw knocks them out, so a first-round loser can play all weekend while a beaten semi-finalist gets two games on the last afternoon. A floor written for equal opportunity would rule out the people who had least of it. Set one if your event wants it.
Is there a knockout off the Swiss?
Yes builds a third competition whose field is a merit cut, drawn on reserved seats before anyone has qualified — so the bracket can be published on day one reading "Seed 1 … Seed 8". No leaves the consolation decided by whoever tops its standings.
You can arrive at this screen without having walked the ones before it. Reopening the builder on a ladder already part-built — a knockout, a consolation beside it, and a handover between them — picks up here, because this is the question that was never answered. It also picks up here when the cut is set but its bracket was never drawn: the answers are read back from the handover, so Save and finish draws the missing bracket and leaves the cut, the bar and the minimum as they were. That case announces itself on Format, on the main event's own card, as One draw still missing with a Finish the Progressive Swiss button — the structure list that normally carries this builder is gone by then, closed by the main draw's own existence. A ladder assembled by hand on Format and Pathway arrives the same way, and in that case the consolation's standings count its own games only: that is what the consolation card on Format sets, and what it says when it creates one. The line at the top of this screen states which of the two you have. Where the main event's games are not counted, Count [the main event]'s results too writes the carry-across without leaving the screen. That carry-across is the difference between Reg F4 and a plain plate.
How many qualify? is the size of that cut, counted on win percentage across the main event and the consolation together, with ties split by Regulation F5(4) and the backstop behind it — net hoops, or quality of opponents, set on the handover.
Who is barred from it? names how deep into the main draw stops a player taking a place, whatever their record:
| Barred | Means |
|---|---|
| Semi-finalists and beyond | The last four |
| Quarter-finalists and beyond | The last eight |
| Finalists only | The last two |
| Nobody | The record decides on its own |
Barred players still appear in the standings, marked not eligible, so you can see the rule fire and on whom. It is stored as a round of the main draw counted back from the final, so it survives a draw of a different size — which also means it needs that draw to exist. With a field it is written here; without one it is listed as a remaining step and set on the Pathway once the draw is built.
Minimum games to take a place starts at none, which is what the regulation says: F4 sets who enters the consolation and what record they bring, and puts no floor under the number of games played. The event this feature reproduces ran no such floor either. Raise it and a player with fewer finished games is not placed however good their percentage — a house rule rather than a regulation, stored with this handover and shown on the qualifying table.
It is not the consolation's own Minimum games, which is Reg F5's and decides who is eligible to win the Swiss. Two different questions, two settings.
When it is done
The last screen writes out what you have, in sentences, and lists anything still to do. Reopening the builder on a finished ladder comes back to this screen.
Nothing is moved into the Swiss knockout by any of this. The consolation's standings show who is inside the cut, live, from the first game played; when the field is settled you open Swiss ▸ your consolation and press Lock these 8 into ..., and the reserved seats stop reading "Seed 1 … Seed 8" and carry their names. Re-lock if the order moves, or unlock, right up until a game is played off the draw — see Locking the field.
That is a later day, though: the consolation has no results until the main draw starts knocking people out. If you took Everyone, from the start, its players are already in it, resting, and your job on the day is to mark them Ready as they go out and say they want to keep playing. If you took Add them as they lose, the handover the builder wrote says where the beaten go but does not move them — Swiss ▸ your consolation lists them under Arrivals and one press puts them in, as often as you like across the weekend. What the last screen points at instead is the Event page, which publishes the ladder, the draw and the standings, and is what everyone will be reading all weekend. A visitor opening the consolation there lands on Standings — for a competition with a cut, that view is the qualifying table, holding every player and the record they arrived with. The live board is one pill away; it shows this pool's own games only, which early on is two results and a column of zeroes.
What it does not build
- The Z. Games between players out of everything are not a competition — they are recorded on the Z tab and it appears with the first game you put there. There is nothing to set up.
- The main draw, with no field. As above.
- Anything else. A different shape — a qualifying stage, divisions, a Draw and a Process, a plate cut by round rather than by record — is built the way it always was, on Format and Pathway.
Related
- Choosing a format — what differs between the formats it offers.
- Pathway — the handovers it writes, and how to change them.
- Add a plate — a bracket for the beaten inside one competition, which is a different thing.
- Swiss console — running the consolation, and its qualifying table.