Teams in a round-tournament play against each other a fixed number of times which makes that the set of games to be played is fully determined by the tournament structure.
Nevertheless, the organizers still have a huge influence on the perceived fairness of the final timetable since the order in which the games are played is mostly considered to be important.
Indeed, in body-contact sports it could be that a team is weakened by injuries or fatigue after playing against a very strong team, which would result in a potential advantage for the next opponent of the weakened team.
This phenomenon is known as the 'carry-over effect' and is defined as follows.
Given a feasible schedule, we say that team \(i \in T\) gives a carryover effect (COE) to team \(j\in T\) in slot \(s\in S\), if there exists a team \(k\in T\) that plays team \(i\) in slot \(s − 1\), and plays team \(j\) in round \(s, 1 \leq s \leq |S| − 1\). We also say that team \(j\) receives a COE from team \(i\) in slot \(s\) (
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#0 /srv/vhosts/sportscheduling.ugent.be/htdocs/WWW/phpBibLib/lib/lib_bibtex.inc.php(707): Bibtex->CiteRefs('t', Array)
#1 /srv/vhosts/sportscheduling.ugent.be/htdocs/WWW/RobinX/COERepo.php(47): citet('Russell1980')
#2 {main}
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