Sevilla is a tournament management program for various games and sports with two players or teams competing per match. Originally it was designed for Chess and other sports with a maximum of three results (win, draw, loss) but now it supports minor scores. This makes Sevilla now a perfect competition manager for Football, Basketball, Chess team and most other leagues, too.
Sevilla runs on Microsoft Windows based systems. It was tested on Windows XP (requires SP3), Vista, Windows 7, 8, 10 and 11. Besids, users have successfully run it under Linux (Wine) and Apple’s OS-X (e.g. Winebottle).
Various kinds of tournament types are already supported, and new ones will be added as development on this issue still continues. Already most of the competitive tournament managers support less types than Sevilla which supports:
- Swiss on rating (Dutch), Buchholtz/Sonneborn Berger, Burstein, Dubov and Lim.
- Keizer – popular on Dutch clubs, with various variants to pair on (ranking, but also a dedicated value ranking, TPR, rating, or (Sevilla) percentage.
- Round robin, both Berger (standard) and Rutsch
- Amsterdams
- Amalfi
- Arena
Other pairing systems are considered to be included in future releases. All systems can be used with or without delay. The tournaments can concern individual players or team events; in that case the team may consist of individuals.
As all JBF products, Sevilla includes various configuration options, that enable you to customize your competition as much as you like. You can influence the pairing algorithm, the scoring, the rating calculation and other.
Sevilla does hardly impose a limit on the number of players or the number of playing rounds. The only limit is the one caused by the size of your memory. Also you don’t have to know in advance how many rounds there will be played. You just add a new round each time one is started. This is ideal for lengthy club competitions and for blitz tournaments where no exact round limit can be known in advance.
Sevilla offers various options for tournaments where players can be added later, or where players quit early or miss rounds because of various reasons. For each type of absence the tournament manager defines the score the player will be awarded. For instance absence with prior notification may receive a higher score than absences with no prior notification, and absence for club reasons (for instance for playing an external game in a club team) may be higher rewarded than a normal absence. Besides the classical valuation methods for Keizer-like systems, valuation can be configured by strength, which may lead to a much more fair valuation.
There are various options for customizing the standard concepts like Swiss, Keizer and Round Robin. The competition systems now are responsible for the pairing but not for the ranking. In turn, the definition of the ranking is highly customizable and completely independent of the pairing system. Do you want to rank on score, on minor score, Buchholz score, number of wins? Do you want to set the order of the scoring criteria to whatever you say? You name it, it’s possible. Example: Ranking criteria in UEFA champions league differ from the criteria used in most of the national competitions, but Sevilla can handle them all.
Various additional options make working with Sevilla easier. Several functions are available to copy competition data and settings from one competition into another. Sevilla offers several reporting and printing options, to the printer, to a file or straight into an e-mail message. File and mail reports can in turn be easily imported into an Office program.
Tournament results can be easily published with the internal function to create a website instantly. Or publish results on-line by exporting the results to the publishing service vesus.org. This site is also a perfect companion to player registration, from which players can be imported at the start of the competition. Individual page reporting in HTML format is supported, as well as plain-text. On top of this, for the advanced user, reports can be generated in XML format which can be processed with any XML compatible program, and can be very easy for instance with XSLT to generate beautiful web pages.
Player history and competition statistics are always available. Pairings can be explained; telling if a pairing is possible and who should play white. Score progress and rankings can be graphically represented, and different players can be compared this way. Statistical reports can be made, showing the performance of players compared to their expectancy. Ranking output can be customized. Alternative rankings can be stored besides the main ranking, which enables you to easily view f.i. change in rating, players percentages or performance rating. Progress reports show the progress in scoring and/or position. Rating calculations are supported with flexible K factors. XML dumps allow you to create very detailed reports, which can be used to create very customizable reports using XML style sheet transformations. Game results can be entered in the usual way, but it can also be very helpful to use a bar-code reader to do so. Results can even be gathered using Excel. Bar-code game sheets are distributed and returned to the organization by the players; for the organization no more than two scans are required to enter the results; regardless the number of groups or the playing round. And – the game does not need to be searched for.
Sevilla includes an extensive help, and offers hints on most of the controls. By keeping your mouse onto a control for a second or so the program will show a short explanation what the control can be used for. A nice feature to make the entry of players easier is the import player option. Player lists in text, Word or Excel format can be easily imported into Sevilla, without the need to retype everything.
Sevilla included many more interesting features. Far too many to describe on a page like this. Download it and try it yourself!
Sevilla comes delivered in English, with language files for English and Dutch. Translations into other can be made easily by creating new language files. As far as translations to other languages are available these can be downloaded from this site, although they are not included in the installer. My knowledge of other languages is not good enough but if users make their translations available to me, then I will in turn publish them on this site.