I see on your MSA records that you typically finish with 1 point out of 4 in those Palm Beach Gardens tournaments. (That 1 point is typically against the tournament director. )
That tends to support my theory (stated in an earlier post) that players in plus-score groups tend to get extra whites, while those in minus-score groups tend to get extra blacks.
It has been suggested (I thought it was a Variation in the rulebook, but I can’t find it) that, in round 1, players in the top half be given black in about 55% of the games. That should tend to counteract the upset effect, where most of the upsets in round 1 involve a lower-rated player with white defeating a higher-rated with black.
For example, with 72 players (36 in the top half), the conventional method would alternate all colors down the top half:
BWBWBWBWBWBWBWBWBWBWBWBWBWBWBWBWBWBW
– while the suggested method would do something like this:
BWBWBWBWBBWBWBWBWBBWBWBWBWBBWBWBWBWB
– giving black to 20 of the top-half players instead of 18.
Hey, that only happened the one time! Recently, anyway… might have happened about a year or more ago, too. Though I do tend to beat up on that TD fairly often - I don’t know what it is about my playing style, but he’s never beaten me in 7 or 8 tries, despite the fact that we’re rated within 100 points of each other. On the other hand, we have an 85 year old man at that club who sits at a rating floor slightly below my current rating who still beats me 3/4 of the time. Sometimes, individual playing styles trump ratings in predicting results.
But back to your comment, I think I finish with a 50% score at that club about half the time, though I do end up on the minus side more often than the plus side.
The more I think about it, though, the more I think that my 55% black pairings might really just be dumb luck. For instance, this last tourney where I had black in 3 out of 4 rounds was just a fluke caused by my final round opponent only having played one previous game in that tourney and having had black in that one. I remember the last two times I had byes in major tourneys, they paired me against someone with a bye in another section for an extra game in both tourneys. We randomly picked colors for the bye round game, and I ended up with black both times. Those are just the examples I can think of right away - I’d have to go back through my scorebooks to refresh my memory about other tourneys where I may have had black too many times.
But I guess 55% is within the realm of statistical probability. If it was 60% or more, I’d wonder. Or if I get black for the third time in a row this Saturday.
)