I don’t think it was a pairing error either. But suppose it was. I am surprised to hear that pairing errors can be appealed to an appeals committee and that the appeals committee can award points (and potentially therefore prizes) to players deemed to have been on the receiving end of pairing errors. Where is the rule that states that a pairing can be appealed and that one of the remedies available to the committee is to award points to the appellant.
Rather than adding the redundant 29e5f to the Rules, why didn’t the Delegates fix that?
It was not the appeals committee that heard the complaint. It was the rules committee. I believe that the situation was more political than it should have been. The chair and author were the same person and it was my impression that he didn’t like that anyone had questioned his “under no circumstances” rule. Ira made the pairing with full knowledge of this rule. He discussed it with his staff and others before making it so it was obvious to anyone who knew Ira that he did not take this decision lightly.
At the 1988 delegates’ meeting Tim Redman explained that this awarding of the quarter point was a one time event. The committee’s thinking seemed to be that the director knowingly made a bad pairing. He fought very hard to keep all of the proposed wording change motions from even coming to a vote. He wanted it to go through his own committee where he would have greater control of the situation.
No one even attempted to change the committee’s decision. What good would it have done? The tournament was a year before and the prizes had been distributed. As a 1988 delegate I was more interested in seeing that the rule was corrected for the future.
Thanks for the corrections/additions, Harold. I was still in my first year of tournament play when this occurred. I remember hearing about it, but I didn’t know all the details. I am not sure why I remembered the wrong round or point adjustment.
Regarding 29e5f, which Harold describes it as a “fix” to this political situation. But I don’t see what it fixes.
29e5f says that three of the same color in a row shall not be assigned, unless “there is no other reasonable way to pair the score group” or unless necessary for equalization of colors. In other words, color equalization and alternation are subordinate to pairing players within the same score group, and equalization is more important than alternation. By the time the rules get to 29e5f, those principles have only been mentioned about twenty times in our extremely wordy and chatty pairing rules. So, in the 5th edition, what does 29e5f add? How does it clarify anything?
After thinking about it a long time, the only thing that renders 29e5f as more than a nullity is to interpret it as lifting the 80-pt (29e5a) rule if required to “fix” three colors in a row. While normally transpositions and interchanges for the purpose of alternation are limited to 80 rating points, there is no point limit if the player didn’t alternate colors on the previous round. But if that is the aim of 29e5f, why not just say so?
I’ll go along with the TD when he says it was round 11. The two that thought it was round 12 aren’t really quite sure, and they weren’t the TD.
It doesn’t matter, anyway – the “only in the last round” option is only a variation (29E5f1). The main-line rule (29E5f) makes no mention of whether it’s the last round or not.
OK, so Browne-Alburt-etc-etc was the top score group, and there were only 4 players in it, no pair-downs. Furthermore:
If that’s true, and if Alburt and Browne each had two consecutive blacks going into round 11, then each must have had two consecutive whites at some point earlier in the tournament.
How could a player as highly rated as Browne (or Alburt) have received the “wrong” (non-due) color in an earlier round? There are at least three possibilities:
He may have been the lower-rated player in his pairing.
He may have been the higher-rated, but lower-scoring, player in his pairing. In this case due color would likely be assigned to the higher-ranked (in this case lower-rated) player.
His scheduled opponent’s color sequence may have been out of whack. Going into round 5, for example, if Browne had had BWBW, and his lower-rated opponent BBWW, Browne would get white again.
All three of these scenarios are possible (though the first seems unlikely). Any of them could explain the funny colors going into round 11. But when it happens to two players (out of four), it raises eyebrows.
On the other hand, pairings are extremely difficult in the top score groups of a long tournament. Bad colors (and worse problems) abound.
I’d sure like to see the crosstable, especially if it shows assigned colors. Such a beast, however, has probably long since disappeared into the circular file. I guess we’ll never know whether better pairings may have been available earlier. Sigh.
The wording in the third edition of the rule book as interpreted in 1987 by the rules committee meant that 4 players should play out of their score group rather than assign 1 player his third consecutive round with the same color.
The change was to make pairing within score group as always being a higher priority than avoiding the assignment of the same color 3 times in a row.
Does anyone remember if GM Browne suggested better pairings? I think that he wrote an article on this incident in his Blitz Chess but the chances of me locating that copy are zero. I think Seriwan covered it also in Inside Chess.
Particularly as it’s the next to last round, it seems to me that the best solution would be to drop Browne and his opponent to face the two strongest opponents in the next lower score group with correct color allocation. I’m sure that would have brought its own outraged screams from the lower score group.
Seems to me that the real problem is that USCF point limits for transposition and alternation are too strict and box the TD into a corner on long tournaments. I have my SwissSys settings set to an additional 40 points for both transposition and alternation. I believe I see less ‘bad color options’ in the last two rounds but couldn’t prove it.
I was in the directors’ room when Walter and his wife came storming in to complain. To put it politely, neither of them behaved calmly and they made at least one accusation that I knew to be false. Ira responded politely. He explained how he did the pairings. Walter never made any alternate pairing suggestion that I recall. It was my opinion that he didn’t want to have black against the highest rated player in the tournament.
The confusion may come from the fact that this was not the first U.S. Open pairing incident involving GM Browne. There was a previous incident at the 1984 U.S. Open, which did occur just before the final round. I wrote an account of the whole thing for a local chess magazine at the time; below are some excerpts.
Of course, the TDs here will want to know all the scores, pairings and color histories and I am able to provide that. I pulled out the 1984 tournament bulletins and was able to reconstruct all of it. First though, the excerpts from my article:
"I was attending the Delegates Meeting at about 2:30 PM when suddenly the doors burst open and GM Browne strode in, demanding to be heard by the Delegates. He claimed that his last round pairing (Black vs.Henley) was wrong, that he should receive White vs. Dzindzi. The TD would not listen to him at all he said, and he asked that the Delegates at least give him a hearing.
…
A vote was taken 35-33 against permitting Browne to speak, but a recount was demanded and showed a tally of 33-32 in favor (I voted against). Browne then made a speech, embellishing the facts with an extensive account of the hardships he has suffered trying to make a living as a professional chess master. When he finished there was a heated debate. Chief TD William Lukowiak … got up and said, ‘Pairing decisions are not subject to appeal. If you vote to review my decision you’ll be setting an incredibly bad precedent. Every tournament in the country will have players demanding an appeals committee to examine pairings.’ Then he sat down, and despite repeated requests from the floor, refused to explain the technical reasons for his pairing.
Finally USCF President Tim Redman noted that if the Delegates didn’t do something soon, there would be no time to finish the regular agenda. At this point a compromise motion was passed. 34-29, appointing a committee of three National TD’s to examine the matter and report back to the Delegates. Later the committee report came back: the 3 NTD’s unanimously supported Bill Lukowiak’s pairing. So, the last round was set. And so was a most unfortunate precedent."
Off the top of my head, I would find the strongest possible opponent for Dzindzi at 7.5 from the 7.0s with natural color alteration and then work down.
Ah, OK. I went back and checked: none of these players had faced each other previously, so no pairings are prevented for that reason.
The 2nd edition of the Rulebook was in effect then and it is true that the printed color allocation rules were different. However, in those days there were many NTDs who were ahead of their time when it came to their use of color history analysis. It was widely accepted then (in the TD community, but maybe not widely known by the players) that experienced NTDs should be allowed to produce pairings that would vary from those achieved by following the book by rote.
My guess is that Lukowiak saw that, when you looked only at the later rounds, giving Browne White vs. Dzindzi would mean three Whites out of the last four rounds, while Henley would get stuck with three Blacks in the last four rounds. The pairings he came up with equalized colors for everyone over the last four rounds.
I understand your explanation but disagree with the pairing as it’s overly refined as is the current color allocation rule. Priority should be given to the only player in the highest score group receiving the strongest opponent in the correct color. Browne-Dzindi scores the point for me.
Now I think Browne has a right to be bitter about his pairings in the US Open. It’s OK to give him black 3 times in row one year by following the rule book strictly but in another year he is denied an expected white by creatively ignoring the rule book of the time.
I think “Higher ranked gets his due” was a better rule than the current rule. Regardless, “Higher ranked gets his due” was the rule at the time. It was easily understood at the time by everyone and therefore fair. With the acutal parings, Browne lost his expected white and was denied the right to have his fate in his own hands on board one with the legal pairing as the time. YMMV.
You may think the current color allocation rule is “over refined” but one of the reasons it IS the current rule is the influence of NTDs who pioneered the technique years ago.
There was another factor involved in that 1984 situation, which I did not mention before - how Browne got the 2nd White in a row in round 7. After 6 rounds, the clear leader was IM Vince McCambridge; Browne was the highest player in the next score group down. So Browne was McCambridge’s highest available opponent and got White, instead of his expected Black, because McCambridge was higher ranked by score (though lower rated) and due Black. In other words, Browne had already previously received a favorable color by being paired into a higher score group against the tournament leader. Now in the last round he wanted it to happen again, while also slapping down another contender (Henley) with a third Black in four rounds.
I don’t know if Lukowiak took all of this into consideration but I wouldn’t be surprised. Getting White is a big deal for the top players and Browne had already had a lucky break earlier. This kind of “pairings as an art rather than a science” was common back in those days for the top NTDs. It took a while for some of these techniques to make it into the rulebook but overall, I think they really do produce better pairings.
I think the current rule 29E5f makes it pretty clear that the 200-point limit is out the window if it would give somebody 3 of the same color in a row.
Yep, I think that is clear as far as three colors in a row goes. However, in general (more normal circumstances) I agree with seki that the 200-point and 80-point limits seem arbitrary and possibly too strict. I have stretched that by a few points once or twice for club events.
Now that we have computers and programmers who can figure out anything, can someone decree with certainty how much—in terms of rating point “swappage”—it is “worth” to maintain alternation and equalization?
Isn’t it the 80-point rule that is out the window? Someone with two in a row of a color is in an alternation situation (for the second time) not necessarily a color equalization situation. Besides, 29E5f says that you can have 3 of the same color in a row if it is required for color equalization. (It would have to be a pretty extreme color equalization situation, such as WWBWWBBB). So the rule that 29E5f sets aside is the 80 point rule, not the 200 point rule. No? I can’t think of anything else which 29E5f does, so probably it would have been better just to state that the the 80-point rule does not apply if a player already failed to alternate on the previous round (i.e. now has two of the same color in a row.)
