Being held at The Eden
We are currently in the midst of the 34th Malta Open Tenpin bowling Championships which has attracted around 115 bowlers from at 23 different countries.
The championships started last Sunday with the Early Bird squad and is going strong with some very full squads and increasing excitement as we get closer to the closing of the Qualifying stages on Saturday.
I believe that our format for the Malta Open is quite unique where all bowlers need to play a minimum of 12 games (2 sets of 6 games) to qualify but can play as many sets as they wish – as long as squads are available that is – we will take the 2 best sets as their qualifying games.
All in all 36 bowlers qualify for the final stages on Sunday and these are made up as follows:
From the Qualifying Stages the top 28 automatically qualify with pos 1 to 6 being seeded directly to Final Stage 3, pos 7 to 12 directly to Final Stage 2 and pos 13 to 28 on to Final Stage 1.
Those 16 bowlers going to Final Stage 1 are joined by the Top 4 Turbo Winners who take up pos 29 to 32 and the top 4 Desperado Winners who take up pos 33 to 36.
These 24 bowlers will then bowl a further 4 games for total pinfall with the top 12 advancing to Final Stage 2 to join the seeded pos 7 to 12 from Qualifying.
The field is now down to 18 bowlers who play another 4 games for total pinfall. The top 10 from this stage proceed on to Final Stage 3 and join POs 1 to 6 from qualifying to start the Matchplay stage of the finals.
Final Stage 3 is a 2-game knockout match and this format is kept all through the next 4 stages (FS3, FS4, FS5 and FS6) until we have can declare the Champion of the tournament.
An exciting format through and through
For last year’s event I had prepare a basic excel file on which we ran the scoring. It was a small event last year so it was rather easy to run despite the very basic scoring file I had (which was/is completely manual).
This year we are running the same excel file but with a much larger field of entrants so at the start I was a bit apprehensive as, while I knew the scoring file would do the job well, with the increase in numbers I worried that it would take us too long to process the scores inbetween squads. So about 3 months ago I thought to try and set up an automatic scoring file using the help of Gemini and Google Sheets and tons of prompts and backtracking we finally got a workable sheet.
We are running this sheet alongside the manual excel scoring file during the event to make sure that the automatic sheet is actually updating the scores correctly.
So far so good! 😀
In the meantime I decided to prepare an app using BASE44 which connects to the Google Sheets scoring file and provided scoring information straight to your mobile phone. This, again, required tons of prompts and backtracking until I got the app to map to the correct columns on the sheet and report the results in a clear and proper format. I am actually very pleased with the app and how well it is working so I want to show it off here.
You can access the app here: https://malta-bowl-live.base44.app
Or you could scan the QR code below:
Created with PressDash — Base44 App
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