Your example is a fairly simple one, the place prizes they are tied for are added together and divided equally among the entire score group.
Where it gets complicated is when you have class prizes as well as place prizes, and some people in a score group that earns place prizes also qualify for class prizes.
An NTD once called tie-breaks a mathematical system for annoying the maximum number of people.
You can make special rules for distributing cash prizes (like limiting the maximum some players can win) but those need to be announced in advance publicity.
Usually when I pull something into excel it is not because I did a standard download. See if you can highlight the cross-table with tie-breaks (include the headings line if there is one) and then do a control-C copy followed by a Control-V paste into excel.
I relayed your feedback to the chess nut team today and they addressed one of the issues on the spot. Thereās now a PDF you can download to show the pairings once you have them up and before thereās results. You could print that up and hang it on the wall
Out of curiosity are you referring to:
the quality of the pairings?
the format of the printouts?
the learning curve for using it?
FIDE compatibility?
cost?
In your example tournament it looks like you have an all-byes first round (15 full point, 3 half point, 3 zero point) to force some type of acceleration or some type of early registration enticement.
It looks like you can do manual overrides because the board one pairing in round two would never happen naturally (unless you are using other ratings that are not being displayed).
In round 3 it did not do a 123 point transposition (1705 and 1582) to fix the color equalization problem, so it is dropping only the bottom player in a score group with an odd number of players (there is debate as to whether or not that should be done, so it is defendable choice).
Very good eye. Our club usually sees 20 people a night so itās not quite enough to run multiple sections. Weāve been playing with how to prevent huge rating gaps to enhance the enjoyability so as you pointed out we are toying with a first round of all byes to stratify the field a bit because we donāt have a Club championship to play for or prize money on the line. In a second round you also correctly spotted a manual override. Ellis showed up late and pairings were already up and I offered to let him play in my place so I was supposed to play Denis.
Iām not sure exactly how itās relevant to your questions about winTD. The short answer to that is it was mainly learning curve, usability, cost, and lack of expected functionality. There should be something out there that doesnāt just pair it helps you manage a club and manage tournaments. That a new club or a beginner tournament director could pick up and learn and feel comfortable with; something that looks like it was made in the internet era. There should be something that multiple directors could co manage so if Iām absent I donāt have to transfer a laptop buy a new license or send files.I donāt think winTD is that.
Now you have me thinking about our last round. Why should Matthew and Rob (debatably) have been transposed? They were both white the round prior and Ed was white too. Paul was new so no prior colors. Paul was at 1.5 and the other 3 were 2.0.
Thatās false. You can keep your tournament files on a OneDrive or other cloud-based storage. And you can install the software on multiple laptops on a single user license.
BTW, WinTD has pre-tournament seed points so you donāt have to input a fake round to achieve the sort-of-accelerated pairings. There is also a choice for āall rounds acceleratedā pairings. And for 1-2, 3-4,ā¦ pairings, both of which can be used in small clubs that are trying to avoid massive mismatches.
Maybe. I did say āor sendā and it sounds a lot like you are saying Iād have to download files and upload them to a cloud storage and then the person on the other system would have to download them and use them to pick up where the last left off. That sounds a lot like sending. It also sounds like youād have to do this all the time if you want to co manage an event or be protected in the event someone has an emergency situation and canāt attend (or go through this upload process).
The whole point of OneDrive (or anything like it) is that the users donāt have to know anything about it is actually implemented. You just share a OneDrive among the TDās; there is (in effect) one copy in the cloud. You open it, work on it, save it just like a file on your local computer, except the save goes to the cloud.
And the alternative is what? Save a common copy somewhere on a web site? Isnāt that basically the same thing except the users have to manage the access to it? (Believe me, a lot of club TDās donāt have the type of sophistication to manage read vs read/write access to files.)
Website running the entire tournament management with its own online database, ala caissa chess or (I think) chess nut?
I actually wrote my own online system* that handled club nights just fine at one point so I could do pairings and reports from just an iPad, but I got tired of fixing bugs and also started running larger tournaments.
*It would also log in and do the tournament upload, so then I just had to go to USCF and doublecheck / validate.
The downside of web-based tournament software is that you need a good web connection throughout the tournament, not just during registration (to look up IDs, membership status and ratings).
With phone-based hot spots, this is a lot easier now than it was even a few years ago,but there are still places where phone reception is spotty and wifi isnāt available.
You can register and run a tournament on your phone with Chess Nut but some chess clubs operate out of church basements with no wifi and poor signals so it can still be a problem. In general, access to Internet is not a major barrier for most of the people Iāve chatted with
Vega chess generates the 3 dbf files with the following fields:
thexport.dbf
H event id
H name
H tot sect
H beg date
H end date
H rcv date
H ent date
H aff id
H city
H state
H zipcode
H country
H sendcros
H scholast
H secrec01
tsexport.dbf
S event id
S sec num
S sec name
S k factor
S r system
S ctd id
S atd id
S trn type
S tot rnds
S lst pair
S dtlrec01
S oper
S status
tdexport.dbf
D event id
D sec num
D pair num
D rec seq
D mem id
D rnd01
D rnd02
D rnd03
D rnd04
/** number of rounds to suit and records for each player **/
If this format is still accepted by the USCF then Vega would be good to go. At the time it was developed, it used the latest USCF rule book.
