I’m coaching a scholastic chess club with 27 fourth – sixth-graders that just started this semester. There is an end of semester tournament for the school district in which you send teams of eight players. I wanted to start some sort of ladder that ranks the kids in the chess club, not just for this tournament, but also as something that would hopefully be fun and challenging for them. How have other people done this in their scholastic chess clubs?
At my HS son’s former JH, the ladder is essentially just a very long Swiss tournament with one round per week. You can decide upon a very rough relative strength estimate and then start pairing.
Having the pairings assigned by the instructor/coach helps avoid subsets of players that don’t play others. My wife oversees that club and has access to my copy of WinTD to do pairings, so she can handle any pairing complaints by just saying that is how the computer assigned opponents. At the end of the season the school covers a half-dozen $3-$5 trophies for the top kids that are generally given out at the final meeting pizza party. They also do a small annual non-rated tournament inviting other JH schools in the district ($5 entry fee and pre-order pizza and soda - I did a 16-player 10-round Swiss starting at 9 AM, taking a 1/2 hour lunch break and finishing the awards by 2 PM).
When she did the elementary school club she had two groups of players (veterans and beginners).
Here’s how I do the ladder with my middle school team:
- A player may challenge anyone higher on the ladder.
- A challenge may be refused only if the two players have already played the same day.
- If a lower-ranked player beats a higher-ranked player, the lower-ranked player takes the space above the higher-ranked player if they are three or fewer spaces apart. Otherwise, the lower-ranked player moves up three spaces.
- Before any games are played, every absent player drops one space (unless his absence is excused).
Thx, Jwiewel. How did you do the pairings on a weekly basis. Was it just 1 vs 2, 3 vs 4? It seems you would have to mix it up so the same players aren’t always playing each other. If a lower-ranked player beat a higher-ranked player, would they just swap rankings on the ladder?
The rulebook covers Swiss pairings. 1 vs 2 pairings are also possible, just avoid re-pairing two opponents. At my adult club we use 1 vs 2 pairings and do it in excel (we have a rule that you can’t get repaired against somebody unless you’ve each had four other opponents first).
For a Swiss-lite lesson, Swiss pairings take each score group and pair the top half with the bottom half:
1-9
10-2
3-11
12-4
5-13
14-6
7-15
16-8.
Some things to remember:
- Start pairing at the top score group (everybody begins 0-0)
- Modify pairings to avoid having somebody replaying an opponent (in small sections with a comparatively large number of rounds that may not be possible, but in that case avoid a third game between the same two players)
- Have players equalize colors if possible (same number of total whites and blacks in each even number of rounds played)
- Have players who have already equalized colors then alternate colors
- If a score group has an odd number of unpaired players then have the weakest one paired down against the top of the next group and pair the remainder of the group normally
- You sometimes have to switch players around to avoid re-pairing two players.
- There are Swiss pairing programs available. The two best known are SwissSys and WinTD.
To continue Swiss-lite with a somewhat complex 8-player 4-round example showing various transpositions.
Round 1
1-5
6-2
3-7
8-4
(1, 2, 3 and 4 win)
Round 2
raw pairing (half the players are not equalized)
3-1
2-4
5-7
8-6
actual pairing (swaps in both the 1-0 group and 0-1 group to equalize all colors)
4-1
2-3
5-8
7-6
1, 5 and 7 win, 2-3 is a draw
round 3
raw pairing
1-2 (sole 2-0 vs top 1.5-0.5)
3-4 (remaining 1.5-0.5 vs top 1-1)
7-5 (remaining 1-1 players are paired even though that gives a color conflict)
6-8 (0-2 players are paired even though that gives a color conflict)
2, 3, 6 and 7 win
round 4
raw pairings
2-3 (already played)
7-1
4-5
8-6 (already played)
actual pairings
2-7 (the two 2.5-0.5 players have already played so they are paired with 2-1 players, and the highest 2.5-0.5 has already played the highest 2-1 and thus gets the next 2-1)
1-3 (the remaining 2.5-0.5 player gets the remaining 2-1)
4-6 (since 6 cannot play 8 drop 5 instead)
5-8 (remaining 1-2 vs sole 0-3)
Yes. There is a free program that does this. I’ll post a link later. I understand that SwissSys now has a ladder program built into it.
It does, but it’s clumsy. For my students, I use index cards in one of these. For my club, I just keep the list in a memo in my PDA.