WInTD verses SwissSys - which is better?

Running Chess Tournaments
1

I have been using PairPlus for many years, but am thinking of upgrading to either WinTD or SwissSys. I generally do scholastic tournaments, 5 sections 100 to 150 kids. These are individual tournaments but we generally exclude kids form playing each other. We also generate sectional school team results with 2 to 4 kids making up the school team. I have also wriiten special extracts off the Pairplus databased to generate individual certificates and other reports.

What are your experiences or recommendations?

I presume that I will have to exact data from the new software files as well. The information for the certificaties is Name, Address, School,
Grade, USCF ID, Rating, Expiration Date, Section info, Pairing Number, Final Place in section, and for each round: Color, Result, Oppn ID (pairing Number), and School/Team info: Name & Address

Your opinion would be greatly appreciated

Thanks

PS9 Organizer

2

They both do a satisfactory job. SwissSys gives you better control over the output (you can set the font and point size for each field individually). I also think it’s a little faster in processing entries, but that may just be a matter of what I’m used to. WinTD has more extensive support for fixed-roster team events. It also supports some special functions like prize lists, which I’ve never looked at.

Both of them are better ordered on line from the publishers (estima.com/chess/index.shtml for WinTD). Both of them let you download a demo version, which you should experiment with to decide which you prefer. The SwissSys demo lets you pair up to three rounds; WinTD lets you use all the functions, but you can’t save a file.

3

In recent years I’ve directed mostly smaller tournaments, so I haven’t used the software lately, but my general impression is that WinTD makes more clever pairings (making colors work better), but that Swis-Sys has a more intuitive user interface (WinTD is kind of Windows-geeky).

Bill Smythe

4

PS9 Organizer, I use SwissSys for scholastic individual/team tournaments of 4 sections, 100-200 players, sometimes larger - almost exactly what you described - and have been happy with it. The recent versions search deeper for optimal pairings and handle colors better than earlier versions.

I have also used WinTD. Both programs have their own pluses, minuses, and aggravating quirks. I think most people that use both would love to have a program that combined the strong points of each. Considering that both programs do the same thing, and do it well, they are amazingly different in their user interfaces and operation. I have heard some former PairPlus users say that WinTD was easier for them to learn. To me, SwissSys is more intuitive and more flexible. Both are good programs and it’s probably a matter of what you get used to, and individual preference.

I don’t believe either program would directly generate the individual certificates you describe. Both can export most of the information you mention to textfiles. Personal data and tournament results would be in separate files.

5

WinTD has a Mac version that they’re saying will be released soon. I had a ßeta version of it from a couple of months ago. As far as I know, the Mac version will still be called WinTD (not MacTD).

6

I did a comparative analysis of the popular pairing programs a long time ago (1998).
It’s published at http://www.ioa.com/~hyde/pairing.htm

Both programs have been updated since then. For instance, WinTD now supports HTML export and multiple games per round.

I have been intending to update the analysis but never seem to find the time.

-Kevin Hyde

7

I personally use WinTD for both adult tournaments and scholastic tournaments, and that is the program that was used at Supernationals this past weekend. The people I talk to that use both feel that WinTD is nicer for scholastics while SwissSys is nicer for adult tournaments. I haven’t used SwissSys since WinTD came out so, personally, I only remember the DOS version of SwissSys and the gotchas it had that were probably already fixed last millenium.

With WinTD you can set up team codes and club codes. You can use the team codes for team awards, and you can optionally use the team codes to either completely or partially restrict pairing teammates.

If simply extracting information into an excel spreadsheet will not work then you may have to contact estima’s help support to determine how to do your extract for the certificates.

8

I’ve used WinTD for a few years. Although I have not used SwissSys, I have been around enough people who have, and the word is that WinTD creates better pairings. It’s like any other program though, it’s whatever you get used to. As mentioned before, it’s used at national events.

9

Estima still develops, sells, and supports WinTD. The Mac version should begin shipping this week.

For details on the program, see the WinTD home page at:

estima.com/chess/

I won’t comment on comparisons between SwissSys and WinTD because I don’t think it would appropriate to do so on this forum as an employee of Estima. However, I would confirm some of the comments above by noting that WinTD does indeed feature an extremely sophisticated pairing algorithm. I believe it has many other strengths as well.

We do offer a free downloadable demo version, so my advice to anyone interested in the program would be to download the demo and try it out yourself.

As for the fact that WinTD is not currently available through the USCF sales organization, it simply didn’t make any sense for us to sell it to them at the price they were willing to pay us.

Oddly enough, when WinTD was available through the USCF, they listed the “retail price” as $100, and the discounted member price as $90. Meanwhile, the actual retail price for ordering direct from Estima has been, and continues to be, $90, including shipping to the continental US.

Regards,
Tom Maycock
Estima

10

I have been told that WinTD handles team pairings better. I have used both and have found SwissSys easier to use (although I am much more familiar with SwissSys having used it much more often).

11

I’m getting ready to buy one of these: I figured I would resurrect this thread to see if there were any more thoughts on pros/cons between them. I’m leaning toward Win TD since it sounds like you have more flexibility to set up scholastic team data with it. Swiss Sys users: Does that capability exist with Swiss Sys? Any other reasons to go with one over the other?

Rob

12

I’ve ran a few events (including scholastic team) with SwissSys. I’d say if you have the time to practice with it before the event, it will work for you. It is a big pain unless you know what’s going on. I also ran a state team championship on it without any problems, though it was limited to 14 teams.

13

Generally in WinTD the local scholastic tournaments include the following fields for a player:

Name, USCF ID, USCF rating, USCF expiration date, section of tournament, active/inactive flag, byes by round if any, paid/not paid, gender (generally ignored)

School team Code (we use an updateable master file of local team codes that can show the full name on the team standings list)

Club Code (for High School tournaments the conference code is put here if there is a need to limit intra-conference pairings)

Local Rating (the HS group has its own rating system that is similar to USCF - useful because many HS players do not play USCF during their HS years, and continually using their frozen USCF rating would not be good)

Grade (put into the group code)

You can generate overall prize place lists and also use options to generate by group (grade), rating range and/or unrated. All ties for a place can also be listed.

The fixed board events can have weighted boards and generate match result sheets with the names of the players pre-printed. Team and individual wall charts can be printed.

SwissSys users can respond to how many of these are also included in SwissSys (quite possibly all of them).

I noted that one SwissSys user mentioned having different font sizes on different fields. My version of WinTD does not have that capability at the field level (only the option to change the overall font size), and I don’t know if a newer version does have it.

The auto-save in SwissSys has often been mentioned as being better than in WinTD. Since I do numerous saves anyway, that hasn’t been an issue for me.

14

Aside from the basics (name/ID/rating/exp), the fields available in SwissSys are ID#2 (no idea what this is for), rating #2 (by default this is the Quick Chess rating, though you can change that), local exp, title, club, team (there is an option to “Display expanded team name,” though the character limit is sometimes too short), age/grade, sex, class, and address fields. The latter are important because some of the pairing restrictions come from here.) For most of these you have then option of showing on the wallchart or not. (It gets a little messy if you show them all. Possible pairing restrictions are Team, Club, City, State, or ZIP code. The Zip code flag is a special case, as it will avoid pairing people unless this would require breaking a scoregroup. You can change these at any time, if, for example, you want to avoid pairing teammates except in the last round.

15

I’d say that’s pretty much true of ANY software. If you try to use it “cold” at the event, you’re screwed.

Bill Smythe

16

Maybe it’s for those players who have somehow been assigned two IDs. Maybe it helps the software report problems to USCF, or something like that.

Bill Smythe

17 
The alternate ID (and alternate rating) are often used to list the players' FIDE ID#'s and FIDE ratings, which prints out on the wallchart when the "Display Alternate ID" option is selected in the Wallchart Format menu.
18

I generally use the Club or Team field for this. Can’t say I’ve ever felt like looking up FIDE IDs for the USCF. The problem with using “Rating #2” is that you have to clear out all those Quick ratings for people with no FIDE. (Of course you can disable the auto-import, but then you don’t have the Quick ratings if you need them.) If you ran a tournament that used both the Club and Team flags and had FIDE-rated players, the “ID #2” could be useful.

19

I’m not sure what Thad had in mind for the 2nd ID, the two possibilities that come to mind are a FIDE ID or a local/state ID. I don’t know how many clubs or state chapters assign separate IDs, back when I was keeping the Nebraska list I know we did not.

20

I am so used to it that I forgot to mention that WinTD does allow pairing prohibitions or restrictions by team code, club code or state. I’m not sure about zip code.

WinTD let’s you build a player file where you can enter local ratings. Then you can import players from that file and pull in the local ratings (you can also simply key in a local rating when entering a player). At any time, in the tournament file you can update the players’ USCF ratings directly from the USCF database, and select whether you want the regular rating or the quick rating. That gives you options like using the regular rating, using the quick rating if you have no regular rating, or using the local rating for pairing a player with no USCF rating. For High School tournaments the local rating has priority over the USCF rating for pairing purposes (the HS tournaments are not USCF-rated, but they are rated by the IL chess coaches organization, which makes that rating more accurate for the significant percentage of formerly USCF-active HS players that only play in non-USCF-rated tournaments - for their school).

If the player file has team codes then it is easy to sort that file by team and drag/drop multiple players at a time when a team sends in their registration. For the High School fixed board events I simply drag in the entire team during pre-registration and then remove the extra players once we find out who is really playing. It would be easier if teams would actually send their correct roster during pre-registration, but sometimes they don’t know for certain until they see who actually shows up at the tournament.

By the way, some of the other optional pairing variations I’ve used in WinTD are: fourths/sixths acceleration; both acceleration methods (+1 score or the other more complicated/better? method); Harkness odd man; don’t drop unrateds (thus avoiding computer-assigned byes for them). There are more that I haven’t used and can’t remember off-hand. I’d expect that SwissSys has these as well.