How to run a tennis or cup sweepstake with live results

Tennis slams and linked cup competitions are the least work of any sweepstake. The field is imported, seeded and updated for you.

Setting it up

Go to New competition → Find by sport, choose Tennis or Football, and search for the event. The format is Straight knockout.

For tennis, the players are imported and seeded by world ranking. You'll see how many were imported when you create the competition. A Grand Slam singles draw has 128 players, so even a big office gets several each.

If the real draw hasn't been made yet, the competition will show Field pending, and the players or teams arrive automatically once they're published.

Draw before play starts

Results start coming in as soon as the event begins, and anyone already knocked out is left out of your draw by default. Run your draw before the first matches. If you're late, that's fine — the draw simply shares out whoever's still in. You can tick Include … already out if you'd rather deal out the full field anyway.

During the event

Players and teams are knocked out automatically as results come in, marked auto on the Results tab, and their holders are emailed. You can override anything that looks wrong, or press Report a sync issue on the competitors tab.

Points

Points double each round, from 1 for an early exit to 32 for the winner. With a 128-player draw, lots of players go out early for a point each, so the leaderboard really gets going from the fourth round. You can change the points with Points per round.