I recently ran a State Championship, where after pairing round 5, I got a text message from a player 30 minutes before the round started. His opponent was 400 points lower then him, and felt it wasn’t any benefit for him to play and ask me to repair him with someone closer to his level. He felt this was within the rules.
I do know there are rules for interchange and transposing to make sure colors balance and people don’t play the same person twice. But nothing about making games more beneficial to the player.
I didn’t grant him the request.
What is the proper way to handle this?
I think you handled it properly, a complaint doesn’t always require action.
Without knowing the pairing details (including what settings your pairing program is set to), by round 5 score grouping should make sure opponents are well-matched against each other, and the lower-rated player may have been underrated and/or having a career-best day, or the higher-rated player having a bad one.
That sounds like the lower rated player is a downfloat from the .5 point higher. That’s a truly enormous gap for R5 between the top of the score group and the middle.
I once had the stronger player withdraw after I paired (before computers) so I learned to try look ahead and let the player know so they might get paired way down so they could withdraw a bit earlier. A lot of strong players withdraw after a loss in a penultimate round / bad day in general.
I have heard some complaints in true open tournaments (e.g. 1 section 6 rounds of G/25;d5) in the first round where there were some 800+ differences.
That’s a case where a strategic use of accelerated pairings might be helpful. While, for most players, that rearranges rounds 1, 2 and 3 to be more like 2, 3 and 1, the round 3 1-1 pairings will generally be a somewhat tighter rating range (as the top rated players are more likely to be 2-0 or 1.5-0.5) and the 2-0 mismatches will at least involve low-rated players who have started 2-0.
I do not understand. If you register for an Open section and the next section is U1600, then I would expect possible pairings 400 points up or down. I can’t imagine the top seed whined about playing only one opponent within 400 points of his rating. I also see quite a few experts who were paired with B players in the second half of the tournament. One B player scored 4.0 / 6 and quite a few finished at an even score. SMH.
I was going to mention this, too – but wanted to run a few simulations to see how it runs out.
Of course, there is also the intent of these open sections is to get a chance at the big upset else why not just split by rating – if it is a championship/title open section most folks are reasonable and will choose the under section and the few that want to play up will have less impact. If too few total players nothing is going to help much (even worse with common last round withdrawals)
I’m not sure this was by the top-rated player in the event, who was some 400 points higher rated than the rest of the field. And the request was in round 5 not 6.
U1600 had an R5 pairing between a downfloating 1.5 and a much higher rated 1.0. But the point that if you have a U1600 section and a U1200 section with a few 700-800’s in the U1600, some of the late round pairings in the low score groups there will have very large gaps.
Accelerated pairings would not have helped. They defer (and slightly reduce) the mismatches from round one to round three (for the 75% of the players at 1-1), but they have a tendency to increase the rating differences in later rounds for the middle score groups.
The comment regarding the accelerated pairings was in reply to ChessGary, with the comment about the single section tournament with a broad range of players. The only thing that probably would have helped in the OP situation would be a restriction against playing up more than xxxx points (say 200).