Backyard Cornhole Tournament

Friend and family get togethers are always a little more fun with some old fashioned competition.  People love playing Cornhole and Washer Toss (this works for most backyard games, so I will be using the term Cornhole to cover any of these backyard / tailgating style games), so putting a little tournament together makes it even more fun.  There are a few key things that must occur to have a well run, fun, fair, and entertaining tournament.  The following article discusses those key items and gives a step by step program to setting up the tournament.  I have made some basic assumptions about having cornhole games or the ability to understand how to play the games.  If you need to purchase Cornhole equipment, here are links to a few good websites to obtain the gear:  Cornholeboards, Cornhole boards, cornhole bags, If you have any questions about rules and such, please refer to the following site.

Key questions that must be answered:

1. How much time do you want to devote to the event (i.e. is it the centerpiece of your day, or is this just something that people are doing to kill some time and be social)?
2. How many participants will there be?
3. How competitive are your players?  You want it to be fun, but also organized and fair, so setting the “House Rules” so that everyone is aware is important.
4. What sort of attention span do your players have (for the games and for the tournament)
5. Are you trying to use this as a social tool to help people to know each other better?

The options of how you set up your tournament are truly limitless, so I am going to focus on a few standard tournament options.

The first two questions are the most important so figuring how many players you have and how much time do you have to play have got to come first?

How Much Time do you have Allocated?

If you are hosting an all day BBQ or just a weekend hangout then you could easily keep people engaged in games for a few hours with just a single set of Cornhole, so you may want to play an extended tournament, but have quick games to keep the tournament flowing.  

There are three basic time factors to consider when conducting the format of your tournament and the game play in the tournament.  Games will generally be either short or long, depending on the type of scoring system you have in place and tournaments can be put into short, medium or long durations. A discussion of  the game length is directly below and then followed by the tournament length.

Game Length will be determined by the scoring system that you use (Traditional or Cancelation).

The two generally acceptable practices are traditional scoring (i.e. you get points when you score regardless of what your opponent does) or cancelation scoring (i.e. if you scored 7 points and your opponent scored 4 points, then you would be credited with 3 points for the round).  Obviously if you have skilled players you need to use cancellation scoring or the game could be over in about 2 minutes, if you have unskilled or young players using traditional scoring is often times the better way to go as it keeps the games moving.

Tournament Length

Short

Conduct a partnership draw (put some numbers in a hat and have people draw them out, the matching numbers then form a team and also provide you with a “seed” for your bracket).  Once your teams are seet, then you fill in the names on the bracket and get the tournament going.

Games should be played with traditional scoring and the tournament is single elimination, so each team continues to play as long as they win, if they lose, then they are eliminated.  An example bracket looks like this:

This tournament will go very quickly, but you can run a few tournaments and mix up the teams.

A simple way to extend the tournament above is to make each game a “best of three” so that games are a little bit longer.

Medium Length

To make the tournament a medium length tournament, just make it a “double elimination” tournament.  This means that each team must lose two games to be eliminated from the tournament.  Using the same bracket as above, you add in a losers bracket for double elimination.

Long Tournament

If you are looking for a longer tournament where each team gets some extended playing time then you can run a tournament with “Group Play” first followed by a single elimination tournament.  

The first part of the tournament is a “round robin” tournament where the teams are broken into groups of 4 and each team plays each other team.  At the end of the round robin, the teams are ranked based on their performance in group play.  Those rankings are used to create the seeding for the single elimination tournament.

Unless you have an extremely competitive or regular group of players, I suggest you conduct quick tournaments with traditional scoring.  If the tournament goes too fast you can always have a second tournament by mixing up the teams.

Prior to starting the tournament, make sure you set the house rules so that all players are on the same page. Here is an example set of house rules.