So our club is going to try a Blitz tournament for the first time. Since none of us has a Blitz rating, my directing genius told me to do it with round robins. Only, what happens with an odd number of players? So much for the genius. So, I download the Golden database with the blitz ratings planning to switch to a swiss if an odd number. When I input the players into swisssys (by ID#) the regular rating is entered into the 2nd rating also. Is this some kind of technical problem?
While I have directed a few tournaments, I have never run into this kind of problem before, no one has a rating, do I use random pairing numbers for the first round (and zeroed out ratings), surely I’m not supposed to use the regular ratings.
Why not use regular ratings? The rating is only for pairing, and your higher rated regular players are apt to be better blitz players as well - perhaps not uniformly but it is a place to start.
So what? In each round, whoever would be paired against the highest number player just gets an unplayed round. It is NOT necessary to give “byes” for the unplayed round! With an odd number of players, you will have exactly as many rounds in a round robin as there are players, and each player will “sit out” exactly one round.
In SwissSys, choose “Database setup…” from the “Database” menu. In the resulting dialog box, make sure the “Rating #2” field is “Q_LPB_RAT”.
Even if you do give byes, everyone gets one, so there’s still no impact on the final standings. No real difference one way or the other.
In a round robin ratings don’t really matter, so you don’t need to worry about them. You’re supposed to assign pairing numbers randomly without regard to rating, and everyone will play everyone else regardless.
IMHO, I like round robins for blitz in particular when the number of players will allow it, because the pairings for all the rounds can be done all at once at the outset. You don’t have to wait for results from each round to pair the next one, which helps things move along faster, I think.
Why would an odd number be a worse problem in a round robin than in a Swiss? Either way, somebody has to sit out each round. In fact, in a round robin it’s more fair because everybody has to sit out one round.
At this point, if someone HAS a blitz rating use it because it has not had time to become “stale.” If Quick, then use the higher of the two. Something I started doing in April was to have two separate databases. The old one remained the same, and I copied it to a new folder named Blitz ratings. Each month I update each database with the appropriate supplement file, changing the database within swiss-sys to the correct one. Much easier than continually over-writing the databases as was the original TD/A suggestion.
I generally don’t worry about the number of games a provisional player has, so I can just load the latest Golden DB into its own directory. So if I want blitz ratings I point to the directory with the regular/blitz DB, and if I want quick ratings I point to the directory with the regular/quick DB.
Almost. I know of people who keep using the monthly supplements to add to an existing DB rather than simply using the Golden. As far as I can remember, the differences are: the monthly update must be done for every month rather than just for those months you are doing a tournament (I don’t download every Golden, but if you use them monthly then you have to download all of them); the Golden does not have the number of games a provisional player has played; the monthly does not have the new/renewed IDs of players that didn’t actually play during that month.
This didn’t agree what I remembered, so I just checked the downloaded Golden file for a tournament I ran in June. The provisional ratings are definitely listed as, e.g., “1574/18”.
Are you sure, Bob? I just downloaded both of the September Golden Master files, and I did not see game counts for the provisionally rated players, and those fields are listed as 4 character fields.
Although I never use it, to satisfy my curiosity today I downloaded the text file golden and found that the number of games is listed there. The database file golden has never had it as far as I can tell, and that is the one that can interface with my pairing software.
According to Tom Doan, if we were to change the file description of the Golden Master file to allow space to add in the game count, that would break many/most versions of WinTD, which is one of the reasons we haven’t just quietly changed that field.
Originally the fields R_NRM_DAT and Q_NRM_DAT included the game counts for provisional players. For established players it was used to record title norms.