I noticed that only Swiss Sys and WinTD are listed in the guide to creating a new club. They are also the only two sold directly through the US Chess online store. Does this mean that US Chess has certified that these tools adhere to USCF rules? If so, does anyone know the process to get certified? If not, what is the process for being listed there?
Genuine question. I’d like to list chessnut.club for free there. I’m happy to go through the certification process that WinTD and SwissSys did.
US Chess Sales is not US Chess. It’s a chess company (House of Staunton) that has a contract with US Chess. I doubt they would have an interest in a free product—they are in the business of selling chess products.
US Chess does not have a process for certifying chess tournament software. TD’s decide whether a given product is adequate for their purposes. Note that unlike the FIDE Dutch system which is well-nigh algorithmic, US Chess pairing rules are more flexible—there can be more than one “legal” set of pairings.
Old saying: Three NTDs looking at the same pairings can come up with four legal possibilities.
While you wintdoan is correct on both counts, I think ngl5000 may have meant the guide to starting a chess club when he wanted to be listed “there”. That said, it is logical to list the two widely used pairing programs and not others. You don’t want to suggest unproven software, and as pointed out, US Chess doesn’t have (or want to have) a process for certifying chess tournament software.
I understand the part about HoS though it does still seem that USCF implicitly (if not explicitly) endorses winTD and SwissSys.
Johnny Carson famously said I can’t tell you how to live a good life but I can tell you how to live a life of misery. So while you may not be able to identify the right pairings you can identify the wrong ones and that’s how a certification process could (and should) work.
For every NTD that can come up with multiple sets of legal pairings there are club TDs in multiplicate who aren’t confident coming up with one set of legal pairings without the help of software. Those people, who carry the lions share of the burden of US Chess’s mission (and who seem to be little represented), are terrified of some old vet questioning their pairings and credibility in front of their membership. For them, being able to say they are using SwissSys shuts down these disputes because it comes with the implicit endorsement of US Chess. And because US Chess doesn’t extend this credibility to others, you’ve had next to no innovation in software to support in person chess. The certification process is for these TDs so that they can confidently experiment with new options in a defensible way
I said it was an old saying. SwissSys and WinTD came out in the 1990s and nowadays I think even most Senior TDs would have some difficulties properly pairing a 40 player section without a pairing program. A few of the newer ANTDs and NTDs would also have some difficulties.
There have been other pairing programs come along and one of the key requirements that many TDs have is being able to trust that there will be support for the programs. The other programs were developed and worked but after a while they did not have ongoing support. SwissSys was THE most common pairing program before WinTD and WinTD had an advantage in its development (in the Chicago area) by having regular multi-hundred player events to use as a proving ground for its capabilities. The developers received a lot of feedback from various strong pairing TDs that helped refine it to handle more difficult situations. If you can work with some organizers of regularly-held larger tournaments to refine your software then citing those events would help you break into the market.
If the TD doesn’t know which pairing choices are better than others (much less which ones are just plain wrong), how does the TD know when the pairing program is mis-configured or makes an error or poor choice?
An idea that has been kicked around but never implemented is to have a series of 'What’s the Best Pairing" quizzes on the website, perhaps with multiple-choice answers and an explanation of the plusses and minuses of each option.
I don’t know if Discourse has an option that includes all of that, the poll option doesn’t really have the ‘explanation’ part.
One thing about the FIDE Dutch System (their standard Swiss pairing and the only one they actually test) is that it is basically a codification of the SwissPerfect pairings. So they have a ready-made arbiter of “correct”—if you can match SwissPerfect you are (basically by definition) doing the correct pairings. The certification process requires the tested software to be able to generate random tournaments for checking vs another already certified program and to have a checker which imports random tournaments from an already certified program and reports on any differences.
Since US Chess doesn’t have algorithmic pairings, nothing like that is particularly simple. It would require almost as much work to write a program to see whether a set of pairings is acceptable (i.e. that, among other things, it corrects as many colors as possible without violating swap limits, doesn’t violate swap limits unnecessarily) as it would to write a pairing algorithm in the first place.