Team Pairing Restrictions - Only If Necessary

[relyea]

@kbachler

@scottrparker

Hey guys, this really isn’t rocket science here. You set it at “2” for round 3, and then set it for half a point higher each succeeding round. You can’t forget to attend to this because you have to do something with the dialog box before you can pair the round. While nothing can be made fool proof - fools are far too clever for that - this comes pretty close.

I understand its not rocket science. I also understand that as get I older, a momentary distraction can - and has - caused me to miss something that is un-missable. Being able to set it all at once when I am focused would make that simpler.

Tonight I needed to stop by the grocery store and pick up apples. The grocery story is a half block from my house, and I have to drive by it to go home. As I turned the corner, 500 feet from the grocery store I thought about the apples. Then I thought about something I needed to share with my surgeon about my recovery from some semi-recent surgery. The next thing I knew my garage door was going up and I was about to pull in - and realized I had forgotten the apples. I don’t think that makes me a fool, although it does mean that at my current age I can’t multi-task the way I did earlier - and I haven’t learned to keep my focus.

I doubt I’m the only TD capable of this issue.

Mr. Bachler neglects to mention that many events with team pairings are run on an ASAP basis. If you’re trying to turn around pairings in three minutes it is very easy to just click past annoying dialog boxes. Sure, I’ve read the software license.

Alex Relyea

[scottrparker]

@relyea

@kbachler

@scottrparker

Hey guys, this really isn’t rocket science here. You set it at “2” for round 3, and then set it for half a point higher each succeeding round. You can’t forget to attend to this because you have to do something with the dialog box before you can pair the round. While nothing can be made fool proof - fools are far too clever for that - this comes pretty close.

I understand its not rocket science. I also understand that as get I older, a momentary distraction can - and has - caused me to miss something that is un-missable. Being able to set it all at once when I am focused would make that simpler.

Tonight I needed to stop by the grocery store and pick up apples. The grocery story is a half block from my house, and I have to drive by it to go home. As I turned the corner, 500 feet from the grocery store I thought about the apples. Then I thought about something I needed to share with my surgeon about my recovery from some semi-recent surgery. The next thing I knew my garage door was going up and I was about to pull in - and realized I had forgotten the apples. I don’t think that makes me a fool, although it does mean that at my current age I can’t multi-task the way I did earlier - and I haven’t learned to keep my focus.

I doubt I’m the only TD capable of this issue.

Mr. Bachler neglects to mention that many events with team pairings are run on an ASAP basis. If you’re trying to turn around pairings in three minutes it is very easy to just click past annoying dialog boxes. Sure, I’ve read the software license.

Alex Relyea

You and Mr. Bachler are right in that any time there is a chance to go wrong some percentage of the population will avail themselves of it. As someone who has passed the age to be Medicare eligible myself I am not unsympathetic to Mr. Bachler’s story of momentary forgetfulness. Been there, done that. If you could “set it and forget it” at the beginning of the tournament you could eliminate whatever chance there is for someone to mess it up later, however small. (Of course, you could always mis-set it or forget to set it originally)

In order to satisfy rule 28N1 you would have to be able to set the trigger number for not pairing teammates at “2” for the first three rounds, and then have the program automatically add 0.5 to it for every succeeding round. Maybe Tom Doan could weigh in on the technical feasibility of that?

[jwiewel]

@scottrparker

…

You and Mr. Bachler are right in that any time there is a chance to go wrong some percentage of the population will avail themselves of it. As someone who has passed the age to be Medicare eligible myself I am not unsympathetic to Mr. Bachler’s story of momentary forgetfulness. Been there, done that. If you could “set it and forget it” at the beginning of the tournament you could eliminate whatever chance there is for someone to mess it up later, however small. (Of course, you could always mis-set it or forget to set it originally)

In order to satisfy rule 28N1 you would have to be able to set the trigger number for not pairing teammates at “2” for the first three rounds, and then have the program automatically add 0.5 to it for every succeeding round. Maybe Tom Doan could weigh in on the technical feasibility of that?

It sounds like you want to be able to have a +x setting with you setting x to 2. If somebody only wants to potentially pair teammates in the final round then x would be set to (number of rounds minus one).

[relyea]

@scottrparker

In order to satisfy rule 28N1 you would have to be able to set the trigger number for not pairing teammates at “2” for the first three rounds, and then have the program automatically add 0.5 to it for every succeeding round. Maybe Tom Doan could weigh in on the technical feasibility of that?

SwissSys does that. I set it to “team pairings +2” years ago and only turn it off rarely.

Alex Relyea

[jwiewel]

@relyea

@scottrparker

In order to satisfy rule 28N1 you would have to be able to set the trigger number for not pairing teammates at “2” for the first three rounds, and then have the program automatically add 0.5 to it for every succeeding round. Maybe Tom Doan could weigh in on the technical feasibility of that?

SwissSys does that. I set it to “team pairings +2” years ago and only turn it off rarely.

Alex Relyea

One advantage of “only if necessary” is that teammates in the bottom scoregroups also get paired instead of feeding points to other teams. A weak 5 person team in a 20-player field with +2 pairing restrictions could end up with five 0-5 scores.

Back in 1985 (pre-pairing-programs) I had a 7-round 50-player K-3 section with 25 from one team (which had a lot of relatively new players). I could reasonably avoid teammate pairings for the first two rounds but after that I always has some bottom-board games between teammates (I was able to limit it so that nobody on that 25-player team played a teammate in more than two of the seven rounds). There were a number of different teams represented on the top boards so I didn’t have any teammate pairing issues there. Using a +2 pairing restriction would have resulted in no teammate pairings in any round and multiple 7-0 scores when normal Swiss pairings would have had no more than a single 6-0 score going into the final round.