Can someone please tell me how to set up and record cross-round pairings in SwissSys? I am having trouble figuring it out. I have a RBO in about a week where I may need to do this.
Thanks.
The easiest way to do it is after the fact.
Suppose Jones is cross round paired with Smith between rounds 1 and 2
Jones initially has a bye in round 1, Smith in round 2.
After round 2 is over, you manually edit the records so that Jones’s record shows a game against Smith in round 1, and so that Smith’s record shows a game against Jones in round 2.
I strongly advise you to TEST doing this before trying it in a real tournament.
Some versions of SwisSys have been prone to corrupt the tournament if you edited the records, but I think that’s more of a problem if you change someone’s rating or if you make changes at the wrong point in the cycle. (It seems to be safest to it after all results have been reported for a round but before pairing the next round.)
It would be nice if Swiss Sys had a more convienent way of handling this. It actually made us rethink the value of cross round pairing and currently we simply give the odd player the full point bye. The basic reasoning was that the argument for cross round pairing was to give the player a game. Yet while that happened that player’s opponent still had to basically sit out a round because they played two rounds in the time that everyone else played one. Most kids seem to be happy with the one point bye.
Having said that when we did the cross round pairing we did it after the fact(which often led to some confusion, especially if you got in a hurry and forgot to make changes before pairing the next round) But after the round is over and you have inputted all the results. Change to edit mode with the wall chart view. (You have to make sure automatic update of opponents is turned off otherwise things will indeed get scrambled.)
But now you can put the players opponent number and result in the crossround players field.
I think you will also get warnings that you will have to override when you submit the tournament to be rated if you do it online.
It can be done and with practice isn’t really that difficult.
Oh yeah I forgot you have to remember to take out the player that played twice so he or she doesn’t get paired in the round they have already played. Then you have to remember to put them back in.
As long as the cross-round pairings are between adjacent rounds, you may get a cautionary note but you shouldn’t have to override anything.
It does not handle cross-round pairings between non-adjacent rounds well, but those are not very common.
This is the one item that actually made me go look at WinTD. I had heard that WinTD handles the crossround pairing easily. But I think I’m just too ingrained with what I learned with. Still learning for that matter, discovered last week that SwissSys handles adjournments.
I use WinTD, in which you have the ability to edit individual games and set the round number for each player (during round 2 you change the game of your round 2 bye player to have that player playing round 2 and the opponent playing round 3). That way you do not have to remember to take a player out of the next round’s pairings if the player has already played that round early, since WinTD already knows about it.
In a small multi-week, one-game-per-night tournament, I am willing to have a (low-scoring) player that finished early play an extra rated game against the odd-man player. To insure that they will not play again, I’ll list the odd-man’s opponent as playing in a future round that is greater than the number of rounds of the tournament.
After uploading the tournament (or prior to uploading) I have to shift the odd-man’s round number to the same as the opponent so that it will properly validate.
One thing I’ve noticed with cross-round pairings is that it is somewhat common to have a half-point bye normally result in an odd-man in only one round (after that round the number of players is even again), but using cross-round pairings in that round would result in having to use cross-round pairings is all successive rounds as well (one of the even players in each round would have played the round early, leaving an odd number to be paired). That has made me more willing to do cross-sectional pairings if that is a viable option (the odd-man players each get a bye in their section and the results are put into an extra games section). I very rarely do cross-round pairings any more.
You have to go into , and turn off . Then you can use Edit mode to force any pairing you want.
Thanks all for your input! I will get into one of the dummy tournaments and try it out.