There has been this idea of a club tournament. Since the club is meeting now on Monday and Wednesday, I want to have the Wednesday meeting be the club tournament. Kinda like it have the Blitz and the Quicks, still like to have a G/30 event or slower. The official meeting time is 7pm till 10pm, so there cannot be many rounds with longer time controls. Have been thinking of a month long swiss, but they have forfeiting and withdraws making the last round a pairing mess.
The idea is this, have a club tournament with only two rounds. The time control be G/30 or G/30 (t/d 5), so everyone should get one white and one black. I would have to be the house man, if the event has an odd number. Have the entry fee be low, like $2 without a prize. Has any ever had a format like this, and did it work?
Two round tournaments are OK, but why not just run quads at that point?
I’ve tried two different systems:
Pair the people who show up (or call in to let me know they’ll be a little late.) This doesn’t work well for club championship events, but works fairly well most of the time.
For our city championship event we would run rounds this way for 8 weeks and then use the standings to seed into 6 player RR final brackets. High-rated players who couldn’t make the prelims ran the risk of not getting into the finals, so they tended to try a little harder to make most of the rounds. With 8 rounds (and usually 25 or so players), missing a round or two still made it possible for a high-rated player to make the finals.
Pair in advance, post the pairings online and give people 2-3 weeks to get the game played. We used to hold a 6 round event over 8 weeks with built in makeup dates on week 3 and 6. Treat games that are rescheduled as adjourned until after the next makeup date.
If there were around 20 players in the event, we usually had 2 rescheduled games each week.
There was a local organizer in New York when I was a kid who ran 2-round swisses in 4-man sections. Called them “Flash Quads”. So I know it’s been done, but I can’t recall how well it worked (it was 30+ years ago). I think they went on for several years, though.
Problem is, if White wins both games in round 1, two people get two Blacks, and two get two Whites. Can’t have everything, I suppose.
Can ‘ladder’ games be rated? If so, you could just pair everyone who shows up and send in the games for rating once a month or so.
As long as all games in the event/section are being rated (an ABSOLUTE requirement for a rated event), it doesn’t make much difference how the pairings are determined, so a ladder event is ratable.
However, if two players face each other more than twice in a section, those players are not eligible for bonus points under the ratings formula.
The USCF recommends sending in a monthly report of games played for events that run several months. (We recently received a report of a club event that had been running for over 12 months, that’s a rather long time to wait to have those games rated.)
The simple answer is because that’s what the ratings formula specifies.
As to why the Ratings Committee specified that, my best guess is that bonuses are supposed to reward performance significantly above expectations against a diverse field of opponents, and having 3 or more games from one opponent may not be as representative of the player’s true strength.
But as always, if you have questions about the ratings formula, I strongly encourage you to contact the USCF Ratings Committee about it, as that’s their domain, not mine.