Golf Pairings for a Golf Weekend

A friend of mine was going on a long golf weekend and ran into what I thought was an interesting scheduling problem.

With 8 people (2 foursomes) playing 7 rounds, how can we construct the foursomes over the weekend so that each golfer gets to play the same number of rounds with all the other golfers?

I’m not sure if this is a well known problem, but I wasn’t able to find much on it (certainly not from a golf standpoint; it may be well defined in a different domain). In any case, I put together some R code to try and find a solution.

As it turned out, for the given number of players (8) and rounds(7), I was able to come up with a schedule where everyone got to play with every other golfer exactly 3 times over the course (ha!) of the weekend.

I’ll give more details in a future post; for now, here are the foursomes, where PL1 is Player 1, PL2 is Player 2, etc. Note that this is obviously not a unique solution, as swapping any two players would result in a new solution.

Download a CSV with the following  solution here