Fencer: I was thinking along the lines of having the program check the tournament after one person has finished all of the games. As you say, if that person has won all their games, they're the winner of the section. For all the other situations you could have a chart for each possibilty and have it check the chart. It might be easier to write a program to create the chart and then just use the chart as a table look up kind of thing. This seems like a lot of work to me and you'd need a different chart for each size section. Still, once there's a chart covering every way a section can be finished, it'd check it fast and wouldn't require any further calculations.

I'm thinking a brute force method might be the way to go even though it requires a calculation each time. There's not that many different ways a tournament can finish after one person has finished all of his games. You could just have it check to see if that person wins no matter what happens to the other people in the tournament. The moment it comes back with someone else the search is over until the next completed game and then check each person that has finished every game in the section.

If all that is too much trouble, it would still be a good thing just to have it cover some very special cases. The case with one person being done and having won every game. The cases where one person is done and only lost one game and everyone else has at least two losses or has lost to this person. Just adding this would probably cut down on a lot of idle tournaments, let alone if you covered every possibility.

I'm thinking the "two games colors switched with drawn games counting as a half point each" kind of tournament would take a different set up, or would it be the same thing?