When I’m dealing with an actual group of pairing cards, I might try to move them around in groups (slide a couple down and move the old bottom one to the top, in this example). Physically moving them this way helps (sometimes) to avoid total chaos when you’ve got a whole bunch of them on a table in front of you. With pairing software doing the work, physically keeping up with the cards isn’t a problem.
That being said, I no longer see any justification for making any transpositions or interchanges that do not have a direct benefit: to improve color alternation or equalization or to avoid pairing friends or team mates. I wouldn’t consider making an “extra” transposition just to keep more of the bottom half of the score group in ratings order.
This sounds as though you prefer the second method.
– But now you sound as though you prefer the first method.
I don’t regard the second method as creating an “extra” transposition. Rather, the first method jumps over the middle pairing – on BOTH the top half side and the bottom half side. The second method is just one “slide”, even though it involves two cards.
Incidentally, spreading out all the cards on the table is, in my opinion, an amateurish way to make pairings – and a LOT of TDs do it, even some senior TDs. But imagine if you had 100 players in the score group!
Instead, when pairing a score group, just make two piles – the top half pile on your left, the bottom half on your right. In this example, you’d see that the top two cards (1920 and 1520) don’t work right for color, so just bypass as many cards as you need to in the bottom-half pile, in this case pulling out the third card (1500) for the top pairing. Put these two cards together (with the card of the player receiving the white pieces on top), then turn the pair face down and put them into a third, “paired” pile. Then the next two pairings automatically come up favoring the second method, and again are turned face down into the “paired” pile.
Bill Smythe