How to address this. A player is unable to make the 1st day (the director was aware of this) of a two day tournament the first day is 3 rds, with 2nd day 2 rds. Should the director just give the player missing the 1 day a U on the wall chart?
If the tournament advertises availability of half point byes, it is reasonable for the director to give the player as many half point byes as allowed. Other missed rounds are treated as “zero point byes” (unplayed rounds). The player starts with no color history.
The usual advertisement of 5 Round Swiss 3 games on Sat and 2 on Sun all 40/90, with two sections unrated and rated and then players agreed to drop the unrated and have an all rated section. Nothing was said about byes, I guess the director just gave out 1/2 pt byes for the person who missed Saturdays 3 games. Total of 8 players.
The best approach is probably to try to ‘seed’ the player where he would likely have fallen in the standings had he played on the first day, so that he is neither given a major advantage due to his absence nor a major handicap.
That will depend where his rating would put him in the field and the total turnout.
If, for example, he is the strongest player there, it probably makes sense to put him at 2 1/2 or even 3. If he is the weakest player, then it might make more sense to put him in at 0, 1/2, 1 or possibly 1 1/2, but probably not higher than that.
The US Open used to use this approach in seeding in the players who entered at round 7 (of 12), which was called the “busyman’s schedule”. But it was a large tournament with a fairly predictable field.
Ok, thank you that helps understand the situation.
If this is a small tournament with a low EF and minimal prizes you probably won’t get too many gripes no matter what you do. The players are just there for some friendly games. If the EF and prizes are more substantial, however, I would be wary of giving more than 1/2 point for any missed round unless you have advertised that possibility in advance. In that case the other players are likely to be quite upset if someone waltzes in with three full point byes for the first three rounds, whether he is the highest rated player in the event or not.
I don’t think the Busyperson Schedule seeded people where they likely would have been if they played. It was lower than that but within recovery range. But note that half the playing schedule still remained.
I have a rule of thumb of no more than one half point bye per four rounds. As to when that/those bye(s) can be taken, I adhere to rule 22. Note that I sometimes include bye information in my TLA. That overrides the above. Players can take as many zero point byes as they want, as long as it is not a round robin or otherwise prohibited.
Alex Relyea
It’s been a while but I thought that schedule gave at most 3.5 or 4 points for the first six rounds (with six more to play), and you probably had to be over 2400 to get the max.
Ì thought it was possible to get 5 points, but you would have had to be a super GM to do it. (I thought Yasser got 5 points one year.)
It accomplished the goal of putting the latecomers into the field at reasonable scores, so that they weren’t burdened with impossibly difficult or ridiculously easy pairings. It probably under-seeded them a bit, meaning a busyman player had to have a GOOD event to be in the running for any major prizes.
One of the things I discovered doing ratings system analysis for US Chess is that the Swiss system very seldom pairs players with really close ratings against each other. That’s because each point pool is paired upper-half against lower half. In reasonably large events, more players wind up with ratings differences of 100-125 points than with differences of 0-25 points.
One year the US Championship was held at the same time and place (probably started a little earlier) with a knock-out format, and players knocked out could come in with the number of points they scored before the knock-out.
Thank you all for your input on this matter.