There are various reasons why there are 10000+ pawns and just 400 paid members. Mine is that I simply lack the free time to devote to all those nice features of a paid member. And I'm not even joking about it - the features ARE very compelling, but I'd need a few more than 24 hours in the day as well! I'll just stroll along on my free ride and its unavoidable limitations... Keep up the good work!

BIG BAD WOLF, the procedure is much simpler than that:

- Take the maximum number of players per section as designated by the tournament creator
- Take one away
- Multiply by the number of time each pair will play
- Voila, the absolute maximum number of slots needed!

Surely that maximum number of players per section is stored somewhere, the max slots needed is just (that number-1)x2, nothing computationally intensive! And this can be done before kicking players starts. If they simply do not have this necessary number of slots, EVEN if they might eventually need less, they are kicked! This way, we can be sure that people can continue playing to their maximum 20 slots all the time, not reserve extra slots that will NEVER be needed by a tournament...

<What I cannot understand is WHY restrict to 5/10 when NO MORE THAN 4/8 are needed in a 5-max-per-section tourney! Even if players are removed, surely NO section will exceed 5 players, right? If you tell me that there CAN be sections with >5 players in a 5-max-per-section, then we have a problem understanding what MAXIMUM means :)

OK, at the risk of sounding pedantic, here goes:

In a tournament, we have a maximum number of players per group, say MAXP. We also have a number of games to be played between any two players in the group, say NUMG. Each player in the group will play all the others - the number of opponents is therefore (MAXP - 1). Multiplying this number by NUMG, we get the total number of slots needed at the most for a tournament. Of course, if a group's number of player is less than MAXP, then they will actually need less.

If anyone offers a satisfactory explanation WHY in a 5-per-group 2-game tournament one needs 10 and not 8 slots as proved above, I will have to tear up my mathematics degree, as such explanation is bound to have any number of fatal flaws...