I’ll be directing a blitz tournament in a few weeks, and the plan is to have each player go two games per round against the same opponent, one as white and one as black. We use WinTD to pair the rounds, and WinTD does allow two games per round, but they have a player the same color each game. I can’t find a reasonable way to make the program switch colors for one of the games, not can I think of a reason why a tourney would be run with two games with the same colors per round. Does anyone know if there’s a way to make WinTD do what I’m looking for? Thanks.
I don’t quite understand why you would care what it says in the “color” box. When the players are paired, they are told to play one game with White and one with Black. I use SwissSys, which for double-round tournaments gives the opponent number but leaves the color blank.
The reason he might care, is that in subsequent rounds the program will make transpositions to make the colors “work”, which is pointless in a double-round event.
You might try changing the transposition limits from 200 to 0 (for equalization) and from 80 to 0 (for alternation). Then the program won’t make any transpositions for color.
Bill Smythe
From the WinTD help menu:
WinTD makes it easy to run tournaments in which each pair of players play each more than once per round. Here’s how it is done:
-
When you create the section, use the Games Per Round field in the Add/Edit a Section dialog box to enter the number of games that each pair of players/teams should play in each round. For example, enter the number 2 to have the players play twice per round.
-
When you pair a round and display a Games Window, WinTD will normally show only the pairings, not each individual game. Use this view to examine or change the pairings. Note that if you do Print Window or Print Games Windows, the pairing sheet will only list each pair of players once.
-
To enter game results, or to print pairing sheets listing each game, you’ll need to select Show Expanded Matches from the Games menu. The Games Window will switch to the “games” view, which displays all of the games between each set of players. You can switch back to the “pairings” view by selecting Show Pairings from the Games menu.
-
From the “games” view, you can enter the results of each game just as you would in a normal Games Window (using Quick Keys or the Enter Results dialog box). When you pair the next round (or do Update Scores/Standings or Print Prize Lists), WinTD will automatically tabulate the results of individual games and assign points accordingly. For example, in a 2 game/round tournament, a player with a win and a draw will get 1.5 points for the round.
Notes
If you leave the Games Window open in the “games” view, it will keep displaying the games rather than pairings each time you pair another round. However, if you close the Games Window and then open another one, you’ll need to do the Show Expanded Matches operation again to see the games.
Note that you can only specify multiple games per round for individual or combined individual/team tournaments. This feature cannot be used for team or board-weighted team sections. In many cases, tournaments where teams are supposed to play each other more than once can be handled as “multi-lap” round robin tournaments. This is particularly the case for a two team match, which is trivially a round robin. See Pairings: Round Robin for details.
I have used this before without a hitch.
Tim
I think you are creating a problem where one does not exist. Unless WinTD’s double round tournaments are completely different than Swiss Sys’s, it is assumed in the program that players are playing one game each with white and black. The program then only uses scores to make pairings and not colors. The pairing sheet has to come out someway and in swiss sys, one player is just given white and one player black on the pairings sheet, but the program and the players know they switch colors during the match. There is no need to make WinTD do what you want as it would result in two pairing sheets each round and would completely confuse the players.
The one big problem that WinTD used to have is that is could not undo the double round format for submission to USCF. I used to have to take WinTD results from poor WinTD users, convert them to Swiss Sys and then use Swiss Sys double round conversion program which would take the 5 round double and convert it into a ten round tournament for submission to USCF. So, if this is the case, the problem is using WinTD in the first place!
Michael Atkins
Which brings up an interesting point. I seem to remember seeing something a while ago saying that the USCF was working to make double swiss format submittable, that is to make it so that you could put in results into the score box greater than one. Is this my imagination? If not, has there been any progress made on that front?
Alex Relyea
That would be a question for Mike Nolan. As of right now, all the double blitz events require reformatting into 2x the number of rounds. When I submitted the Foxwoods Open blitz a couple weeks ago, it still required the change from a 5-rd double to a ten round single event. This isn’t a problem or an issue with Swiss Sys, just an extra step in the rating submission
There have never been any plans to handle double round swiss, there are some hooks in the program to handle double round robin events.
The rest of the code will probably go in the next time I work on that part of the interface, which is likely to happen this summer when we update TD/A to look like the rest of the newly redesigned website and support reporting of color information (which FIDE will require starting in July.)
It’s possible that they way I’m handling double round events would accomodate swiss pairing as well, with a bit of additional code.
When I looked for double events, most of the ones I found were round robins, not swisses, and there weren’t that many of them.
You probably will find none at all until the WBCA folded and the USCF began rating blitz events as quick events. WBCA folded in Nov 2003 and it was probably a couple months later that the USCF started accepting blitz as quick-rated events.
The ultimate goal should be a blitz rating system sometime in the future. I now this has been a topic in the past, but blitz is a totally different creature than quick chess and to merge the ratings is like taking an apple and an orange and averaging them out - what you get is pretty meaningless. When played by WBCA rules (which the USCF OUGHT to adopt for blitz - This probably would/could have been done had the WBCA folded a year earlier. When the new rulebook was written, noone paid any attention to USCF blitz rules because they were silly and any serious blitz was WBCA. Had Tim suspected that the WBCA was going to fold, changing the USCF rules to WBCA rules for blitz would have been preactical then),
without scorekeeping, blitz is completely different than quick and should have its own rating system.
One of Bill’s original reasons not to have blitz rating system was that the current rating supplement couldn’t handle another column without it only being readable by microfiche. As the rating supplement in paper is eventually phased out, that reason will cease to exist.
Mike
I think Bill Hall is finding out that there are a lot more TDs out there who use the printed supplements than he thought.
Usually this is because the TD does not have net access at the tournament site, but there are still some TDs who do everything by hand, and don’t even have a computer on site that they can use to look up things using the latest rating supplement files.
I’m not sure there are enough blitz games being rated to make that a viable rating system.
Three reasons. One, mentioned before, is that equalization of color rules could affect subsequent pairings, unfairly in this case. Thanks to Smythe Dakota for the tip on zeroing out the Equalization and Alteration values. I’ll do this just to be on the safe side, but with Tim Just’s lead I was able to find a better, acceptable way. In the Show Expanded Matches view, which list each game twice, the Games menu has a “Correct Colors” function. this will quickly flip the colors for the highlighted players. I can run down the list doing this to every other game in only a little time. My schedule doesn’t have a lot of time between rounds, and I intend to play in this event myself, so it’s important I can make these adjustments quickly.
The second reason is that I don’t want to confuse the players when it comes to reporting results. I agree it’s not rocket science, but in the hurried pace of a blitz tournament mistakes like this are far more likely to occur. This was a problem in a mini blitz event we had last year, so I’m looking to avoid the same hassles this year. With cash prizes on the line, eliminating errors helps maintain the club’s good will.
The third reason is that as a software engineer myself, it rankles me when a program’s interface seems to do exactly the wrong thing, and then makes it difficult or impossible to do the right thing (especially in the medical device field, this is a critical consideration). I can’t imagine why a tournament should be run with double games per round with the same colors in each game. I think the default should be the opposite. Is there a reason why the program’s behavior is natural? If not, I’ll be writing a suggestion to Estima about this.
Thanks for everyone’s advice. I hope we get a good turnout on May 13 for this event, and the computer cooperates without a hitch.
I was referring to Bill Goichberg when he was E.D.
Agreed. WinTD does not seem to have an “ignore colors” option otherwise. It appears that the program is poorly adapted to running double-round swisses (admittedly, a very small percentage of the market).
Hear, hear.
I have never bought the argument that “I’m not sure there are enough blitz games being rated to make that a viable rating system” [Mike Nolan]. Some clubs even have their own blitz rating systems. If a club can do that with a roster of 50 players or so, surely USCF could handle it with a roster of a few hundred or 1000. If the small number of players reduces the accuracy of the blitz ratings, so what? It’s just a “fun” thing anyway.
The difficulty of adding another column in the rating supplement is a red herring and should not be used as an argument against progress. If nothing else, the blitz rating could be put on a separate line below the regular and quick ratings, thus increasing the size of the supplement only to the extent that there are players with blitz ratings.
Oops. You forgot that scorekeeping isn’t required in quick either.
You can already do that, if you really want to, and some TDs already are doing it. An executive order by then-ED Bill Goichberg (published on the web some time ago, I don’t know whether it’s still there) permits such things as the elimination of the 2-second delay, completion of an illegal move losing immediately, etc, without notice in advance tournament publicity (just announce it at the site). This effectively gives you WBCA rules.
I strongly disagree that the USCF rules are silly. The 2-second delay keeps the word “chess” in “blitz chess”. And allowing a game to continue despite an inadvertent illegal move keeps the rules from being monstrously harsh.
And the rulebook isn’t keeping anyone from doing what they want. As mentioned above, you can override these rules if you want to, without advance notice.
Bill Smythe
Bill, just because something works at the club level, that doesn’t mean it can work at the national level. Many clubs run ladder events, but that’s not something that I think could be made to work at the national level.
My concerns over the viability of a separate blitz system is that I just don’t see the volume of events to make it work. There’s also the issue of cognitive dissonance. The Quick system is mostly ignored by players and TDs alike, most quick-only events I know of use player’s REGULAR rating for pairing purposes! How will yet another ‘independent’ rating system fit in?
I have had some thoughts about dropping the membership requirement on the quick system (but not dual rated events) for events submitted electronically, though that would be possible for blitz events as well. (It might be necessary to have a one-time charge for registering new players, something I thought the JTP program should have had 15 years ago.)
The advantage of making a standalone blitz system online-only is that the rating supplement could be online-only, too.
We know, for example, that the bulk of G/30 events are scholastic. If these were changed to G/25 so that they were quick-only, I don’t see that having much of an impact on the performance of the players, and it might enable us to bring some of the non-USCF-rated play back to the USCF.
This may be one of the things that comes up at next weekend’s Board retreat/planning session.
–Kill paper supplements.
–Add Blitz ratings; for these, require electronic submission only.
Net winner for USCF, right?
I don’t think paper supplements are going away any time soon.
There are still TDs running events by hand and there are many events held at sites that don’t have net access.
There was no net access in the TD room at the 2005 US Open, because the hotel wanted something like $500 a day for it, so on those occasions when they needed net access a TD had to go back to his room and use a net connection from there. Wireless access was available for $10 a day, but it didn’t reach to the room where the TDs were.
What happens when some TD sends in a blitz event on paper, or when some parent wonders why his kid has to pay dues to play in some rated event when he didn’t have to pay dues to play in last week’s rated event?
A bad idea and a good idea.
There would be no need to kill paper supplements. Just add a blitz rating system, but don’t publish blitz ratings in the paper supplements. Require those running rated blitz tournaments to have internet access during registration. Electronic submission wouldn’t really have to be required, either.
Bill Smythe
I have my suspicions that the USCF loses money on reports submitted on paper, and even with electronic submissions there are some significant administrative costs to running a rating system, correcting errors, dealing with problems and complaints, etc.