Yesterday I was directing a scholastic tournament and for some reason I had a significant number of no shows in each section. In all four section I repaired on the floor one or two boards to minimize forfeit wins. In the top section I had three no-shows and I repaired two of their opponents to end up with only one forfeit. One parent went ballistic when his son had to play a game instead of winning by forfeit. His point was if there are three people who would win by forfeit there is no fair way to pick the ones to play and thus all three should get forfeit wins. My point was that we are here to play chess and I wanted to maximize the number of chess games. (btw, no one in the lower sections complained).
I’m pretty sure I did the right thing but when I tried to look it up I couldn’t find it in the rule book. I know I could just invoke TD discretion but is there a rule about this and I missed it?
Thanks,
Mike Regan
Try 29G2. I agree with your decision, since no player has a “right” to a forfeit win. The practical problem, however, is what to do with those missing players if some of them show up late.
Re-pairing to account for round one no-shows is a very common action in scholastic tournaments at local, state and national levels. I’ve done it for more than two decades at local and state events, and at almost all of the dozen or so national events I’ve directed at.
You could just as easily had a complaint from the parent of the player who received a forfeit win, because that player then had less of a chance for good tie-breaks to get a higher ranking trophy. If you had left all three un-re-paired, then that would have denied all of them a chance to play, and some of the parents would have complained about their kids being “cheated out of a game”.
In this area, a 5% no-show rate is not unheard of. For that reason my pre-round-one announcements always include a statement that players whose round one opponents do not show up will be given new opponents if at all possible. Here we generally do the re-pairing around 10-15 minutes after the start of the round one. Because it is standard practice, the parents and coaches are good at arriving on time. We withdraw all of the no-shows and thus do not need to re-pair any of the later rounds. It is only rarely that the opponent of a re-paired player shows up late, and often they show up so late that they would have had a forfeit loss anyway and are thus given zero points for the round.
As long as your re-pairing made sense based on the ratings of the opponents, you actions were easily within TD discretion.
In adult tournaments I’ve only done re-pairings (ladder style) to insert a player who had been removed (usually after taking a bye that had not been properly recorded - there was one case like that at the HB Global tournament and the class format allowed me to give every re-paired player a lower rated opponent than they originally had, and to give an opponent to the player with the bye).
John,
I didn’t want to complicate the post but that happened too. Someone showed up at 50 minutes and now they didn’t have an opponent. I don’t think it affects my first decision and in the end I had to give the late arrival a forfeit win.
Mike
mregan,
Just out of curiosity what was your time control? In my area, many scholastic tournaments have time controls less than 50 minutes and a player that late would get a forfeit loss.
I agree that re-pairing was the correct decision and that no complaint is justified. You probably couldn’t do this at the World Open, but it’s common practice at scholastic tournaments to just re-pair those whose opponents haven’t showed up.
Lots of scholastic tournaments require a “check-in” even for those that registered in advance. That way anybody that doesn’t check-in in time for the first round doesn’t get a pairing, doesn’t disrupt your tournament by requiring a re-pairing when he doesn’t show, and has no room for complaint if he isn’t paired. This sounds like a good idea to me since scholastic tournaments are hard enough on the TD without adding re-pairing to his (already full) list of duties. IMHO any TD that re-pairs for no-shows has gone above and beyond my expectations and deserves a thank-you, not a complaint.
The time control was G/60. I really want the top players to play slower. So the late arrival just missed losing on time.
Mike
You said that in all four sections you re-paired one or two games, so that was 8 to 16 players who were originally looking at having to wait an hour to get a forfeit win. Since one opponent actually showed up you traded 7 to 15 forfeit wins for one bye. If any of the re-paired players were unrated or provisionally rated, you also helped them get closer to a regular rating.
A player cannot know whether or not their opponent will actually get re-paired, so deliberately showing up late is no guarantee of getting a first-round bye.
Although they may work in some areas, check-ins have had a checkered history in other areas (including the Chicago suburbs). There were always players who pre-registered and arrived just before the start of the round (after pairings had already been done) and would not have had a chance to check in. There were coaches who checked in everybody on the team that they thought would arrive, even if they weren’t actually there yet. There were parents (and coaches) who were still relatively new and did not know about check-ins. We’ve found that trying to do a complete check-in can delay the start of a tournament by 30 or more minutes, and still only reduced the need for re-pairings by about 25% (it may have caught 75% of the real no-shows, but that would be off-set by the people present that did not check in, or by those pre-registered and arriving at the last moment). That is one reason why the state’s K-8 group decided in the mid-'90s to make it a standard that first round games with no-shows should be re-paired after 10-15 minutes (they were giving de jure status to a de facto practice). That allowed the rounds to start on time and kept things consistent from one tournament to the next. Moving the tournaments to advance registration only also helped them start on time (scholastic tournaments are the only ones I’ve seen that have occasionally had to turn away ADVANCE entries because the player limit had been reached).
Since the rounds in the local tournaments are run on an as-available basis, parents and coaches have become willing to put up with some round one pairing problems in exchange for tournaments starting on time and finishing quickly (we have often started successive rounds 45 minutes apart in the K-3 G/30 section and have occasionally finished the awards by 1:30 PM in a five-round, 100+ player, G/30 section that started at 9 AM).
That desire for finishing quickly has caused the one-day tournament’s time controls for the four-round middle school sections to drop over the decades from G/75 to G/40-50, and the five-round elementary sections have dropped from G/50 to G/30-40. The seven-round, two-day state championship generally has longer time controls and fixed starting times for the rounds.
Just repair the late arrivers.
My standard answer to a parent in such a case is to mention the fact that a forfeit win doesn’t count for tie-breaks. Since the difference between who gets a trophy and who doesn’t is often times determined by tie-breaks, the parent will generally understand and not be as upset with the repairing.
In practice, this is what happens, but it can get unpleasant. E.g., player shows up half an hour late and says “Why didn’t you pair me? The rules say I have an hour!” With kids, the answer can be “Because I’m an adult and you’ll do what you’re told,” but this doesn’t always work with real players.
Hi John,
I wouldn’t do this in an open (money) tournament. Just in scholastic tourneys.
Jon
One way around that would be to include the following statement in your ads:
Players who do not arrive by 15 minutes into the 1st round may be treated as no-shows and may be re-paired when they arrive.
That might work in Big Sky Country, but it wouldn’t go over well with L.A. freeway users.
Re-pairing after 15 minutes works fine in the Chicago area. The parents and coaches actually helped push for this and codified it in the state’s K-8 organization bylaws.
In our scholastic tournaments we use a combination of repairing, and hand pairing late arrivals. In order to get the first round pairings up on time we have a policy of door entries arriving after a certain time of being given a 1/2 point bye or being paired by hand. When we have no shows we will often use the late comers to take the place of the missing players. We make an effort to pair top 1/2 vs bottom 1/2 as much as possible.
The parents want their kids to play if at all possible. Once in a blue moon we will get a complaint about not giving the forfeit win. Usually it’s after the game is done, and the kid lost.