1  WHAT DOES FIXTURES.EXE DO ?
------------------------------

1.1 fixtures.exe is a program to automatically
generate fixture lists for any given amount
of teams. This amount must be even (eg, can
be 4, 8, 20, but not 3 or 11) and is restricted
in the range 4-50 inclusive. Note that you'll
hardly ever need a league of 50 teams, which
will result in 98 rounds being played :-)

1.2 fixtures.exe generates perfectly balanced
fixture lists, when each team plays each other
twice during the season (one game home and
one away), and all teams play every week.
Unfortunately, the home/away balance isn't perfect
and it happens that a team plays 2 consecutive
home or away games, but this also reflects reality.
Note: Actually, it is a fact (which can be quite
easily proved) that it is impossible to have 
a perfectly balanced home/away games schedule
for every team in the league.

1.3 Note that this program isn't really connencted
with the ESMS package, and can be used independently
for any purpose.


2  HOW DOES FIXTURES WORK ?
---------------------------

2.1 Using fixtures.exe itself is trivial. Its input
is a file named teams.txt which simply contains 
a list of teams which make the league. For example:

AC_Milan
Lazio
Juventus
Parma

The program will read this file and create a league
out of these teams in a file named fixtures.txt,
where each "week" is denoted by the week number and
a list of games for that week. For example:

1.
AC_Milan - Lazio
Juventus - Parma

2.2 fixtures is a deterministic program, meaning
that every time you run it on the same teams.txt
the same fixtures.txt will be generated. If you
want to vary your fixtures list (eg, the order 
of games) from season to season, simply shuffle
the teams in teams.txt a bit to get a different
fixtures list.

2.3 Important restrictions: Please recall that 
the amount of teams should be an even number
in the range 4-50 inclusive. The team names
in "teams.txt" are restricted to 40 characters
each.

If you didn't understand any of this and need some
assistance contact me at spur@cyberdude.com, I'll
gladly help.

Special thanks to Gary Brown for supplying me with
the algorithm to create fixture lists. The algorithm
was meant to be used on "pencil & paper", all I
had to do was convert it into a program. If you're
interested for the source code of fixtures.exe
drop me a note and I'll send it to you.

-----------------------------------
Eli Bendersky: spur@cyberdude.com
