No more clipboards: building poole.esgrima.pt

If you have ever been to a fencing competition, you know the scene. There is a table at the end of the hall, a stack of photocopied poule sheets, and one very stressed person with a pen doing arithmetic while thirty parents stand around asking who won.

Fencing has one of the most beautiful ranking systems in sport — victories, touches scored, touches received, indicator — and we resolve it by hand, on paper, in a gymnasium, with the clock running.

So I built poole.esgrima.pt.

What it actually does

The whole thing is one idea: score the bouts as they happen, and let everything else fall out of that automatically.

You name an event, add the fencers, and the platform generates the full bout table for you in the official FIE order. From then on you are just tapping in touches given and received. Rankings, indicators and tie-breaks recalculate on every single entry — nobody adds anything up ever again.

No account. Nothing to install. You add a password only if you want to keep editing to yourself.

That second card is where it gets interesting. A referee scans a QR code, connects a phone to a piste, and calls the bouts from there — as many devices as you have pistes. The organiser's screen shows what is fencing right now, what is up next, and a running activity log of every result recorded, corrected or refused. When something is disputed at 6pm on a Sunday, that log is the whole argument.

And of course, the sheet everyone actually recognises:

Poules are the easy half

One poule is a nice weekend project. A tournament is the real problem: several pools fenced in parallel, then a cross-pool seeding, then a direct elimination tableau.

That is the part I was most interested in getting right, because it is the part that goes wrong at real events. The seeding is a ranking across every pool at once — victories per match, then indicator, then touches scored — and it is frozen the moment the bracket is generated, so nobody can quietly change a pool score after the tableau is drawn.

Sixteen of thirty-five athletes made the tableau. Nineteen went home after the pools, and the page says exactly why.

Then the bracket seeds itself and fences down to the final:

There are two bracket formats, because fencing has two: the classic tableau, where losing means you are done, and the all places determined format, where the bouts below the final keep going to place every single athlete. A tournament is not finished when the gold medal bout is over — it is finished when the last placement bout is in.

The link is the feature

Here is the part I did not expect to care about as much as I do.

Every competition has a public page. One URL, one QR code you can tape to the wall of the venue. Coaches, parents and fencers all look at the same live results, updating as the touches land, without anyone asking the person at the table anything.

Standings, the poule grid, the order of play, the bracket — the whole event, read-only, on a phone.

Built for the phone that is already in your pocket

There is no app to install for the organiser. The scoring interface is designed for a thumb, at a folding table, in a sports hall with terrible Wi-Fi.

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Built for fencers, by a fencer. poole.esgrima.pt