Q.Explain the procedure of drawing a fixture on the League/Round-Robin basis using the Staircase method. Draw a staircase fixture for 6 teams and calculate the total number of matches.

Fixture Definition

Before a single ball is bowled or a single race is run, someone has to answer a very practical question: who plays whom, in what order, and when? The written plan that answers this is called a fixture. In sport, a fixture is the schedule of matches or contests drawn up for a tournament — it tells every participant exactly which opponent they face and at which stage of the competition.

Why a Fixture Is Needed

A tournament cannot simply let teams play whoever they want, whenever they want — that would make results incomparable and the event impossible to organise. A fixture removes that chaos. It is drawn according to the rules of whichever tournament format has been chosen, so that the schedule is fair, predictable, and complete.

Fixtures Depend on the Type of Tournament

How a fixture is drawn depends entirely on the tournament type:

• Knock-Out (elimination): A team that loses is out immediately. The fixture is a bracket — teams are paired, winners advance, losers leave. If the number of teams is not a power of 2, some teams are given byes (a free pass into the next round) so the bracket works out evenly.
• League or Round Robin: Every team is fixtured to play every other team once (or sometimes twice). No team is eliminated early; the fixture spreads matches across a fixed number of rounds.
• Combination: A league stage (often used to rank and shortlist teams fairly) is fixtured first, followed by a knock-out stage among the top finishers — used when there are too many teams for a pure league to be practical.

Terminology Note

The underlying idea — a schedule of progressive matches — goes by different names depending on the sport. In Athletics and Swimming it is usually called heats; in Tennis, Badminton, and similar games it is called ties or fixtures. The concept is the same in every case: an organised sequence of contests leading toward a final result. …