I’ve just started a tournament that will run over the course of 4 Mondays where everyone is playing two games against each opponent per round. (One white and One black) When I submit this for rating will it run afoul of the match play rules? Will I need to do anything special when I submit it for rating?
Thanks ahead of time Mike. 
No, it should not run afoul of the match rules, this is a double-round-robin event. The validation report will (properly) indicate that players faced opponents more than once, but that is not an error or warning, just an advisory message.
However, depending on how many players there are, you could run into some problems getting the event uploaded. WinTD and SwisSys used to have limits of 14 rounds, so if there are more than 8 players you could have some problems creating and uploading it. (As far as I know, WinTD still has a 14 round limit but I’ve recently been told by Thad Suits that the latest version of SwisSys now supports events up to 20 rounds, but I do not have a copy of it to test whether those events upload correctly.)
One way around this is to create two pairing #s for each player, like this:
1 (P1)
2 (P2)
3 (P3)
4 (P4)
5 (P1)
6 (P2)
7 (P3)
8 (P4)
Pairing #'s 1-4 play each other and pairing #'s 5-8 play each other. Because we aggregate all games under each USCF ID before rating them, this will properly rate all of P1’s games (as pairing #1 and 5) together, etc.
You could also use the online editing form to create the event, it will handle events up to 32 rounds. (There’s no particular reason for the number 32, it was chosen as an arbitrary upper bound. So far the largest event we’ve rated under the current programming was a 24 round event.)
By extension you could do a triple or quadruple round robin and it would still not fall under the match rules. However, if a player faces the same opponent more than twice in an event, that player is not eligible for bonus points under the ratings formula.
There’s probably a point at which the office would be inclined to look at an event more closely to see whether it falls within the spirit of the match rule limitations, such as a four player event where each player plays the others 6 times each, but that would fall under the ED’s discretionary authority to protect the integrity of the rating system.
Sorry I should have indicated that this is only going to run for 4 Mondays, so it won’t be a round robin. I’m using Swiss Sys and I think if memory serves it has an option to convert the double results into results for uploading. I think it basically changes it from 4 rounds to 8 rounds.
I’ve done this time of thing before as an unrated event where it just affects our local ladder. We are playing Game 30 so that the games will be dual rated. I’ve always liked the concept that when both players play both colors against each other that it removes the inbalance of color. Now that I think about it I wonder if I should make adjustments to SwissSys to cause it to ignore Color when pairing?
It shouldn’t be an issue with our small tournament with no entry fees and no prizes but I could see where it might be an issue at times.
An event where you play two games against each opponent you’re paired against (one as white, one as black) is also not a match as long as there are enough players. Entering this one using WinTD or SwisSys might be more of a challenge if it exceeds the maximum number of rounds they support.
I thought SwisSys had an option to do this, it comes up more often in blitz events, I believe. I don’t know if WinTD has an option for this or not.
As with time controls, there are more ways to run an event than we can anticipate, so we try to cover the frequent/obvious ones and the rest we just have to deal with as they occur.
In WinTD you specify two games per round. That specification must be done PRIOR to the first round being paired. You generate the tournament report exactly as you would any other event.
It is common for the quick-rated swiss blitzes at the scholastic nationals.
In SwissSys, in the “section setup” dialog, set the event type to “regular swiss” and the style to “double”. You can then enter results in the pairing chart view as 0, 0.5, 1, 1.5, or 2 (the accelerator keys are L, D, W, #, and $).
The problem I have with that reporting format in SwisSys is that we don’t know which games were won with white and which with black, etc. When reporting events to FIDE, that becomes significant, and some day it may become significant in a USCF context too.
For all practical purposes, we don’t know the white or black wins at the national scholastic blitzes using WinTD. The scores are reported as 2-0, 1.5-0.5, 1-1, 0.5-1.5 or 0-2, colors & individual game information is not listed, and they are entered however is convenient. On the WinTD expanded entry screen, the player listed first is listed under the white column for both games and I’ve simply gotten into the habit of entering that person’s points first (i.e. a 1.5-0.5 result will be entered as a win and then a draw, a 0.5-1.5 result will be entered as a draw and then a loss and a 1-1 result will be entered as a win and then a loss even if both games were actually drawn).
That is what I’ve done. And I am keeping track of color and order of wins seperately. I think SwissSys has an option to convert these results into a format that will be 8 rounds. ( I don’t have it here with me at the moment to check. ) But then I will go back and make sure color and stuff is accurate before uploading. I was more concerned about the match play issue delaying the rating of the tournament.
And now I’m wondering about the color issue as it affects pairing. But it may adjust itself out because after each round each player will have played the same number of colors. So it shouldn’t make a difference.
The colors shouldn’t affect pairing. As far as I can tell, SwissSys doesn’t event retain color information for this. If you’ll look at the wallchart, it will say, for example, just 5, instead of W 5 or B 5 like it does with a colored swiss. There’s also an option, at least in more recent editions of SwissSys, to record the result as a double draw, as opposed to a win and a loss. Not sure what effect, if any, that has when you convert to a single swiss.
Alex Relyea
On a related note, has anyone else had trouble getting SwissSys to correctly convert double round-robins to Swiss format for rating upload? I’ve tried to do this twice; both times, the players’ pairing numbers have gotten scrambled, and I’ve ended up with nonsensical crosstables and had to reconstruct the entire tournament from scratch as a fake Swiss tournament using manual pairings in every round.
If you have package turned on in the pairing chart SwissSys will show due color etc.
Here is the SwissSys Help info for the double-blitz format. What I’m doing isn’t really blitz but other than that it is the same thing.
Just change the transposition limit from 80 to 0 for alternation. Leave the limit at 200 for equalization (just in case somebody drops out of the tournament after playing 1 of his 2 games).
Bill Smythe