Submiting Long Events for Rating

Running Chess Tournaments
1

I’m going to be directing an event that will span 7 months with 14 rounds, 2 per month. I use WinTD and will have a minimum of 32 players each round. I know we don’t want to wait 7 months to submit the whole thing at once for rating, so I’ll be sending in results every month or two. In WinTD I need to keep the cumulative rounds together for our purposes, but obviously I only want to have the newest rounds rated each time.

I’m not aware of any way to delete earlier rounds entirely either in WinTD or on the USCF website prior to rating as if they never existed, though certainly I can delete pairings and results, but the columns will still appear. The three solutions I’ve thought of are:

a) create a separate section in WintD for each submission, manually duplicate the pairings and results for just the newest rounds to be rated, and upload just that section, not the cumulative… which sounds like a lot of work and prone to errors;

b) make a backup of the tournament in WinTD each time, and in the version to be submitted, delete prior round results or replace them with byes prior to uploading. If I was ambitious, I could replace them with byes matching the actual prior round results so you would seem the cumulative score when viewing results in MSA, but that sounds to me like even more work and error prone than (a). Or

c) similar to (b), have WinTD create the USCF report for all rounds to date each time, but after uploading to USCF, edit the results of the rounds submitted earlier to show them as unplayed games (or byes, as above) prior to having the tournament rated.

Offhand, option (c) sounds the easiest on my end, but by the last submission under (b) or (c), the MSA report would be showing 10 or 12 rounds of unplayed games or byes, and just the final two or four being rated. That sounds like a lot of visual clutter, especially toward the end.

None of these sound particularly easy or appealing to me, does anyone have any other suggestions?

Thanks for any input.

2

Moderator Mode: Off

If by “section” you mean tournament, then I agree with your first option.

Here’s what I would do:

  1. Start out as one tournament. Let’s say you name it “Long Tournament”

  2. At the end of the first or second month, submit the results you have in that part, but keep that tournament handy for future pairings.

  3. The next round, start another tournament. You would name this tournament “Long Tournament 2”. The 2 would designate to you that this is the 2nd part of the ongoing tournament.

  4. Go back to the “Long Tournament” and pair your next round.

  5. In your “Long Tournament 2” force the pairings to be what your “Long Tournament” makes the pairings.

  6. Do this for the next 3 rounds, until the second 2 months are over.

  7. Submit “Long Tournament 2” results for rating. This will be a separate tournament for rating purposes without the first part, which was already rated, even coming into consideration.

  8. Proceed to the next round, going back to “Long Tournament” for pairing. OF course you would now start a 3rd tournament and name it, “Long Tournament 3”.

In the end, your WinTD will have the “Long Tournament” with all the rounds of the complete 14 rounds.

The MSA will have numerous tournaments rated with the first one being “Long Tournament” and the following ones being numbered, but separate tournaments for rating.

You say you would need to input the pairings manually. Isn’t there a way to allow the pairings to happen per the program and then you can change them? I know this is possible in SwissSys.

3

The process you described is indeed what I had in mind for option (a). And that is the direction I’ve been leaning the more I think it over.

Your suggestion to let the program pair the stand alone sections (representing just of subset of the tournament) makes a lot of sense… much easier to change what it sets up, than to do it all by manual pairings. Thanks!

4

Make sure your version of WinTD can handle 14 rounds.

5

Yep- older versions will not do more than 12 rounds.

6

Version 4.11c (the latest released version, unless there is something that someone isn’t telling me) only handles twelve rounds. (I just tried a section with 32 players. When I tried to pair the 13th round, I got a message dialog with the somewhat unhelpful message “Value too large.”)

7

I hadn’t even thought about that. I can probably work around the limit for pairing purposes, but it’ll probably make things a little harder if we need to figure out tie breaks at the end.

8

I primarily use SwissSys, so I am not aware of the limit in WinTD. Is the 12 round limit also limit a double round robin or swiss to 6 rounds? In SwissSys I don’t think this would be a problem.

9

[i]System Administrator’s Note:

Prior to 2005, the ratings programming did not handle events larger than 20 rounds.

The current ratings programming limits events to 32 rounds (the longest event we’ve rated since 2005 had 24 rounds), but the dBase file format for uploading, which was issued in around 1991, may not work for events larger than 20 rounds, since it splits the ‘detail’ file into 10 round chunks.

While the dBase file format should extend to a third segment, I don’t think I’ve ever tried creating a dBase file with more than 20 rounds in it, so I can’t be sure that the upload program would handle it properly. That means it isn’t clear that a double round robin or double Swiss event that results in more than 20 rounds (at one game per round) would work, and one that results in more than 32 rounds would definitely not work.

It won’t happen right away, but there will be a new XML-based upload format standard that includes all of the additional fields in the new tournament data entry program. The authors of WinTD and SwisSys have been contacted.

WinTD does not currently have a way to track which schedule someone came from in a merged section, and the new program has fields to enter separate time controls by round and by schedule, and to flag which pairing #s came from which schedule. [/i]