Aptitude Matching
Run a development / come-and-try event where competitors are matched by ability — not weight class — so everyone gets fair, useful fights.
Aptitude matching is its own competition type, chosen when you create a tournament. Instead of the IJF age × weight × gender divisions, competitors are grouped by a single 1–5 competitive aptitude — with weight only a tolerance — so the point is giving everyone fair fights rather than crowning division winners. It suits club development days, come-and-try events, and gradings.
Choosing the type
On the create screen, pick Aptitude matched as the competition type. You can also switch an existing tournament in the tournament's settings — switching resets the grouping (it discards existing divisions), so you'll be asked to confirm.
Setting competitive aptitude
Aptitude is a single 1–5 read on how competitive a person is. It's a coach-audience field — competitors never see it. Two people fill it in:
Coaches, in advance
From their club view, a coach sets each competitor's aptitude. To help, the system shows their belt, time doing judo, and their last-known aptitude and prior fight record from earlier tournaments — a suggestion only, never applied automatically.
The organiser, on the day
Anyone still missing an aptitude shows in the matching board's outside the automated rules panel, where you can set it in one click before matching.
The matching board
The Matching tab is where you set the rules, generate the fights, and adjust everything by hand.
Set the rules
Choose the strategy (round-robin groups, or direct favourite/underdog fights), what defines a category (age or belt/grade), the gender rule, the weight tolerance (% of bodyweight, ±kg, or age-scaled), and the aptitude window (default ±1 — a 3 fights 2s, 3s and 4s).
Generate matches
The matcher pairs people within category + weight + aptitude, aiming to give each competitor at least one favourite fight (against someone a notch below) and one underdog fight (a notch above). Generating replaces the current groups; your manual edits are kept until you generate again.
Adjust by hand
Drag competitors between groups or use move to…, add a custom group, and manually pair any two. Someone can be in more than one group to get extra fights or rescue a poor match. Nothing is locked to the automation.
Resolve the outside-the-rules list
Anyone the matcher couldn't place — no compatible opponent, or no aptitude set — is listed separately so no one is silently dropped. Set an aptitude, drop them into a group, or relax the tolerance and regenerate.
Fights, winners & results
Every fight is a real match — record a winner and loser on each bout from the board. What aptitude events deliberately don't produce is an overall group or division winner, standings, or medals; the goal is the fights themselves. Public results stay hidden by default (the same visibility toggle as any tournament), and each recorded result feeds the competitor's cross-tournament history — so next time their last-known aptitude and record are there to guide the coach.