Table of Contents
I. How do pairings work in TFT?
II. What's a Kanban board?
III. How to use a Kanban board to track pairings in TFT
IV. Kanban software
I. How do pairings work in TFT?
II. What's a Kanban board?
A Kanban board is a tool used by programmers to manage their tasks. But for our purpose, all that matters is that it's a bunch of columns with drag-and-droppable cards.
III. How to use a Kanban board to track pairings in TFT
Setup the board with three columns: Non-recent, Recent, and Eliminated. The Non-recent column will contain the possible pairings for your next battle.
At game start, make a card for each opponent, in the Non-recent column. Make a DUMMY card to use when there's an odd number of players alive; for now, put it in the Eliminated column.
At each battle, move that opponent's card to the bottom of the Recent column.
Whenever there are more than X cards in the Recent column, move the top card(s) back to Non-recent. X is 4, 3, 2, 2 respectively when 8, 7, 6, 5 players are alive.
When a player is eliminated, if their card is in Non-recent, move it to Eliminated; else if their card is in Recent, keep in its place in the list until you'd normally remove it, and only then move it to Eliminated instead of back to Non-recent.
When the number alive becomes odd, if the DUMMY card is in Eliminated, move it to Non-recent. When it becomes even, if the DUMMY card is in Non-recent, move it back to Eliminated. If the DUMMY card is in Recent, keep it in its place in the list until you'd normally remove it, and only then move it to Eliminated if even, else Non-recent if odd.
When the number alive becomes 4 or 3, a round robin starts. (When it goes from 4 to 3, a NEW round robin starts.) At the start of each round robin, empty the Recent list and move the DUMMY card appropriately; thereafter, in order to track the round robin, let Recent fill up until Non-recent is empty before emptying Recent again (although usually the round robin won't last that long).
Exceptionally, when the number alive becomes 4, the first round of the round robin won't pair you against your most recent opponent (assuming they're alive). You have two options: You could track this by leaving their card in Recent, but you must remember to remove it before tracking the actual round robin; otherwise, to avoid having to remember to remove it, you could remove it immediately after noting which players you can face next.
For a demonstration, you can watch me use my Kanban board in this video: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/956409208
IV. Kanban software
I'm using https://github.com/kiswa/TaskBoard but it's a pain to setup.
Lots of Kanban apps have a free plan but make you register an account (because unlike for TFT, normal Kanban usage involves persisting data longer than an hour).
https://my-personal-kanban.neocities.org doesn't need an account, but the UI is not as slick. There's also a newer desktop version of it that I haven't tried: https://greggigon.com/my-personal-kanban-2-0/