I remember one tournament I directed where the top section basically for 2000+ rated players, but was listed as open. An adult rated in the 800âs could not be dissuaded from entering it. It wasnât a big section to begin with, and along the way there were a few withdrawals. Going into the fifth and final round two Masters and an Expert were tied for first. The only way to pair the section without pairing the same people twice was to pair the two Masters with each other (fine), and pair the Expert with the 800 rated player (not fine). The Masters fought tooth and nail and eventually ended up drawing. Meanwhile the Expert rolled over the 800 rated player in no time and took the first prize. The Masters were NOT happy.
This was years ago, right? I presume you learned from this and started having minimum ratings in the top section?
I was not the organizer of the event, and no, the organizer didnât change his habits.
Better than give the Expert a full point bye.
Alex Relyea
Actually it was pretty much equivalent to giving the Expert a full point bye. Hot knife, meet warm butter.
actually ran into that in a small swiss; the only legal pairing was a master vs a 900. Since it was a virtual walk-over for a $200 prize I let bd 1 players
play twice. I broke the rules but it seemed correct
The goal of the Swiss system is to separate the players by actual strength, ideally to produce a clear winner, if it has done that, then breaking the âplay someone only onceâ rule can be relaxed if it produces better matchups in the final round(s). Neither player will be happy with a large ratings differential and large score group difference matchup in the final round.
Sometimes it is possible in smaller events to anticipate problems like this and alter the pairings before the final round to minimize future huge score group/ratings differentials.
As Ira Lee Riddle said on more than one occasion, a good TD knows how to follow the rules, a great TD knows when to break the rules.
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I played once in a G/30 7 round event with about 30 players. After six rounds I led by half a point, having just played a quick draw with white against the highest rated player, knowing that Iâd already faced the top competition. Imagine my surprise in round 7 when I got paired with him again as black. The experienced TD said that there was no way to pair everyone without a repeat pairing (seems unlikely with that many players, but I donât question his skill or his integrity, so I take that at face value). He decided that since he had to break the no repeat pairing rule anyway it made sense to do it at the top to give me the strongest possible opponent. I thought it made more sense to do it at the bottom where the rule violation had no impact on prizes, but I can see his logic. I lost pitifully and had to settle for second place.
Experienced TDs, do you agree or disagree with his decision?
I might agree or I might disagree, Iâd have to know more details.
It seems unlikely that there would be no pairings at all in 7 rounds with 30 players, but itâs entirely likely there might be no pairings except hideous ones.
By the way, was this a single-section event? If not, how many players were in that section? And how many of them were still in the tournament (i.e. had not dropped out) when round 7 arrived?
Best of all, can you point us to the MSA crosstable of this event? Then we can have a really interesting conversation based on facts.
One moral of the story: Never agree to a quick draw just because youâre pretty sure who youâll be paired against in the next round.
Bill Smythe
I would not do it. I think in general it is a mistake for referees/umpires/TDâs/etc. to ignore the rules and do what they like. If you donât like the rule, then work to get it changed, but your job is to enforce the rules, not decide what they should be. I also think that in the example I cited above had I made a pairing violating the rule against pairing two players twice the Expert would have filed an appeal with US Chess, and at least one former member of the Rules Committee would have been sympathetic to this appeal.
Iâve always found that when doing something that some players might feel is a violation of the rulebook, explaining your logic to them in advance helps. Chess players are, for the most part, logical thinking people.
The TD did exactly that, explaining to me his reasoning. I didnât like it, but I knew he that by his account he was between a rock and a hard place and I knew him to be a man of integrity, so I elected not to give him any grief about it.
To Billâs question, the event was pre-MSA. I am taking the TDs word for it that there were no legal pairings, though I suspect there were hideous ones available. There may have been so many withdrawals it wasnât possible. For purposes of this discussion, Iâm more interested in whether, assuming that the rule against repeat pairings had to be broken, would you do it at the top of the pairing sheet or the bottom?
That might depend on the consequences of each. In this case, it sounds as though putting the repeat pairing at the bottom might have caused the tournament leader to be paired against a sub-1000 opponent with a score well below the leaderâs, so that might be a strong case for putting the repeat pairing near the top.
I sure wish I could see that crosstable!
Bill Smythe
Me too. I do recall there was someone within 250 points I had not faced. But I have no idea about down stream. As I recall this was a single section under 2000 event.
But basically I think youâve answered the question. If one prize candidate would get too much of a free ride youâd do the juggling near the top. The counter argument is that the leader warned the âfree rideâ by winning.
I may not be remembering the size accurately. Maybe there were only 20. I do know I had dropped a game early so I had 4.5-1.5 and was still in clear first.
If there were only 20 players, thatâs getting close to the point where there may be serious pairing problems in round 7.
Several years ago I directed a one-day, 6-round quick-rated event with 14 players. I was proud of the fact that I had been able to make all the colors alternate perfectly in both rounds 2 and 3. Based on what happened in later rounds, I had nothing at all to be proud of. In round 6, I had to give one player his third consecutive white.
It was that tournament that taught me an important lesson, the hard way: Do not make the colors work too well in the early rounds of a small tournament! Doing so tends to divide the players into two camps, those who started with white and those who started with black. In a small tournament, eventually youâll run out of decent inter-camp pairings (good colors), and youâll have to make intra-camp pairings (bad colors) in the late rounds, when they are the least desirable.
In fact, in a small tournament, it might be a good idea to never transpose pairings to make the colors alternate better. Transpose only to make colors equalize better. If you are using pairing software, you can change the rating-difference limit for alternation from 80 to 0, while leaving the limit for equalization at 200.
What constitutes a small tournament, for the above purposes? I dunno. Maybe 12 players if there are 4 rounds, 16 if there are 5 rounds, 20 if there are 6 rounds, etc. If the TD in your case had followed the do-not-transpose-just-to-alternate suggestion in the early rounds, he might have avoided the difficult problem he faced in round 7.
The most extreme example of making the colors work too well is the classic 6-player tournament with 4 or 5 rounds. In that case, if the colors alternate perfectly in both rounds 2 and 3, there will be no pairings all in round 4 that avoid repeat pairings.
If there are 8 players instead of 6, itâs not quite as bad, but youâll probably end up with some really awful pairings in round 4 if you try to alternate all the colors in rounds 2 and 3.
Bill Smythe
I directed many many tournaments at the now defunct Chess Center in Atlanta (Scottdale, actually). I had many instances of ten or even eight player sections for five rounds. I had no problem pairing them, and I equalized and alternated colors as appropriate in the early rounds. Sometimes I did need to check after tentatively pairing round four that I would have a legal pairing for round five, but thatâs about the only concession I had to make. Yes, the pairings did get a bit unusual toward the end, but they were doable without having to pair two players twice.
If there were 20 players for seven rounds there is no way in the world that the final round could not have been paired without having to pair the same players twice. Even if there have been no byes in the tournament, going into the seventh round each player has played six opponents, and has 13 people that s/he has not played. There has to be a legal way to pair this group.
Bill keeps posting that same thing, and other than the six player-four round case, itâs nonsense. With eight players, if you get the colors right in the first four rounds, you are guaranteed to be able to pair all the way through seven rounds. The problem with six players is that you get two groups with an odd number of players which obviously canât be paired within themselves. (Ten players might run into a problem with round six, but it would be extremely unlikely that a Swiss would give you perfect color alternation through five rounds).
Being completely boxed out of any âvalidâ pairing would be very rare in a tournament with (say) 16 players and 7 rounds. Having no palatable pairing would not be all that uncommon. If all valid pairings were bad, I would probably see if it were possible to get a more reasonable set by repeating a low score pairing. WinTD has a pairing option to Avoid Drops More Than xxx (such as 2.0). A pairing with players differing in score by (say) 2.5 would be considered as bad as a pairing with a duplicate. The automatic adjustment that that would make is slightly biased in favor of a duplication on the bottom.
With more than six players, it becomes less of a question of finding pairings at all, and more of a question of getting decent pairings and decent colors.
With any âsmallâ tournament, the pool of a playerâs possible opponents due the opposite color shrinks significantly every time the player is paired against one of them. If that pool starts out smaller than the number of rounds, then it is obvious from the outset that each player will get the âwrongâ color at some point, probably more than once during the tournament.
As an extreme example, with eight players, after 4 rounds, if all the colors âworkâ in rounds 2, 3, and 4, then in round 5, there will automatically be bad colors on every board.
So, since itâs obvious there will be many bad colors, wouldnât it make sense to try to scatter the bad colors throughout the rounds, rather than pushing them all to the end by using up the good colors early?
Thus it is desirable to âencourageâ bad colors in the odd-numbered rounds, where alternation is the issue rather than equalization.
Changing the transposition limit in the pairing software from 80 to 0 for alternation, while leaving it at 200 for equalization, should do just that. By âplantingâ some bad colors in the odd-numbered rounds, more good colors are likely to be left over for the even-numbered rounds.
This âlimited poolâ effect decreases as the number of players increases, perhaps disappearing at about 20 players or so, depending on the number of rounds. So the 0 limit for alternations might be a good idea not only for âtinyâ tournaments, but also for those that are merely âsmallâ as well.
Bill Smythe
Think about it for a second, Bill. With the small tournament, the alternative to getting the colors right on all boards in an early round is to get the colors wrong on all boards. So your suggestion is to intentionally get the colors wrong on all boards in one round to avoid accidentally getting the colors wrong on all boards in a later round. I donât see that as a workable âsolutionâ.
Obviously, the correct way to deal with a 6 player-4 round situation is to do a RR-Swiss hybrid, where the colors donât alternate in early roundsâŚand the pairings are done largely without consideration of score except on board one. If standard Swiss pairing rules are applied, at some point colors are going to sidewaysâthe top ranked player will likely have played everyone on the other color schedule that has a decent score.
On the contrary, getting the colors wrong on all boards is not THE alternative to getting all colors right. Another alternative is to get SOME of the colors right and some wrong. My suggestion for a smallish (but not tiny) tournament is simply to transpose only for color equalization, and not for color alternation. This is a gentle idea that is likely to reduce pairing and color problems later.
For a tiny tournament, of course stronger methods are called for.
For 6 players, this is one correct solution, but not the only one. Another is to alternate all colors in round 2, and then in round 3, make sure you have one âdue white vs due whiteâ pairing, one âdue black vs due blackâ pairing, and one âdue white vs due blackâ pairing. That will work every time.
Bill Smythe