I help run a small club in northwest NJ. We have between 10 and 20 players for most of our events, which include swisses, round robins, quads, and team games. In all we hold about six events per year, which might go up to 8 to 10 events.
We are considering acquiring pairing or club management software. We need something that is easy and intuitive, that permits electronic submission of rating reports, and – I’m not sure if this capability exists – will download player information as well.
Should we continue doing everything by hand or take the plunge? If so, which software products do you think would best suit our needs, and why?
The two most popular pairing programs are Win-TD and Swiss-Sys. You can download the programs and try them out. The demo copy for Swiss-Sys only allows you to do a tournament up to 3 rounds. If I recall correctly, the demo version for Win-TD doesn’t allow you to save your data.
There have been a few threads on which program directors prefer. I have used both programs, but I just like the look and feel of Swiss-Sys.
Using either program you can create the files necessary for online submission of your rating reports. You can download the monthly rating supplements from the TD/Affiliate Support area and access this data through the pairing program. I’m not sure if anyone has come up with a way to update a player’s most current expiration date off the USCF website. I think there was some discussion about it on one of the other pairing program threads. Perhaps somebody who knows how to search for an old topic can point you in the right direction.
The Golden Master files have the most recent membership for all members (including those with no USCF rating) as of the time they were built.
I think WinTD can now update information from the USCF website, but I’m not sure whether that’s just for tournament registrations or if it can maintain and update ‘club’ files. Maybe Tom Doan will see this thread and respond.
(I don’t think we really want to encourage clubs or TDs to try to update the roughly 700,000 names in the latest Golden Master in real time by querying the website for each member, it’d place a huge burden on the web server.)
Vega (http://vegachess.com/en/index.htm) is free for tournaments of up to 30 players. It’s a little rougher around the edges than the two most popular options, but it allows both player import from the USCF files as well as tournament report generation for uploading to the USCF. I used it extensively for running small club tournaments and it was great. And you can’t beat the price.
Very similar except for the feel. Win TD is more menu based and takes a little bit longer to get used to but once you figure it out, it is great.
Swiss Sys is a little more icon based and more intuitive in my opinion. Plus the free for 3 rounds or less factor gives you more to play with and test.
Since we can now edit online by hand, you could hand pair a 4th round and just manually enter it after uploading the 3 rounds of data.
I used to do 4 round tournaments this way when I was a poor organizer back from 99-2001. I’d use Swiss sys for rounds 1-3 and hand pair the last round. I’d then just copy the last round onto the swiss sys wall chart, staple it to the submission report and mail it in.
Personally, If i were you, I’d go with the trial of swiss sys and if you like it, go for it. If you are thinking of major scholastics later, win td is more mainstream there.