I have been made MC for our areas social dancing club and am looking for ways to eliminate dancers down to one couple, who win the prize. (Monte Carlo) Our club has been designating corners of the room to suites and eliminating 1/4 at a time using a deck of cards. This is rather time consuming when 80 couples are on the floor.
Any ideas appreciated!!

Have you considered just hiring a hit man??@

You could make a large dice (die, for the purists) and paint two sides to suit each choice.

thanks for the suggestions! The club also has a "lucky spot" instant prize, so some novel ideas for that too would be fun.

I have done the elimination once so far, and I eliminated 3/4 of the dancers on the first draw. I liked the whiskey scotch and soda idea, it was the sort of thing I was looking for.
I have thought up a few myself - using a dice - "odd" couples standing back-to-back, and "even" side-by-side; having couples place their hands on their heads or their tails and spinning a coin (how would this work with 2 coins?? choices being both heads, both tails or one of each?). Our Ball in 2 months time has a "Purple and Gold" theme, so I thought Id ask the committee to put 3 bunches of balloons on the ceiling - gold, purple and mixed, and set up some way to randomly select one of these colours....what has t sides and would work??

As most of you know, international is a straight-legged hip motion thing whilst american moves on a bent leg.

Does anyone else besides me find difficulty in learning international after american?

da.

You can also go to a comic book store and pick up dice with almost any number of sides. They're used for role-playing games.

ack, accidentally posted as a reply instead of new topic

da.

Sometimes people don't like to sit out after they have been eliminated. After all they are there to dance. Maybe you can think of other ways of finding "winners". Some oldies but goodies are: Lucky spot, Lucky partner - for progressive dancers, or passing items around the dance floor from couple to couple, some of which are winning type prises, some of which are losing (or booby) prises. If you do choose to eliminate, do it quickly!

using foam rubber, covered it with nylon / tricot fabric and stuck felt dots on it.
I challenged the dancers to choose "odd" (standing back to back) or "even" (standing side by side). It was most successful, and over rather quickly 'cos most dancers who stopped to listen did so side-by-side, and stayed that way - - and "odds" was thrown first!!! LOL
An more ideas????

Probably stolen from Arthur Murray is Whisky, Scotch, Soda.

Play a song, dance should travel. Foxtrot is usually what we play. Play it for a time, and then the MC yells one of the above.

If ..... is yelled, the couples do.....:
Whisky ..... guys on one knee, ladies sit on offered knee. Last one down is eliminated. Fall off eliminated, etc.
Scotch ...... Couples must freeze.
Soda .... Switch partners. Last couple to meet is eliminated, might want to do a count down, that way you can eliminate more couples.

Soda is usually the easiest way to eliminate couples, but watch out for ladies with claws, ehh...nails. For fun, throw in some other words (rhyming??) and eliminate the ones who react. It gets really funny when you get fewer and fewer couples, the dance circle gets smaller and smaller.

Another one (if you can have a quick sweeping), is tie balloons on a short string to the leader's leg so it follows behind them. Last balloon not popped wins. Haven't actually seen this one done, but I hear it's really hilarious, if there is just a bit of helium in so the balloon floats just above the floor.

Later....