I am currently directing a tournament. Round 4 started at 6PM. At 7PM, the players on board 2 drew their game (both 2000-2200). When they reported their result on the pairing sheet, they both noticed they had played the wrong color.
Round 5 is tomorrow morning. Should I pair them as the colors they ACTUALLY played, or the color they SHOULD have played?
I assume since the mistake was theirs, I should pair them as if they played the correct colors, but, I am not sure.
Thanks.
STD BPF (STD can stand for Senior TD or STUPID, depending on the right answer).
In a 7 round G/10 event my opponent and I played with colors reversed in a middle round. Our experienced TD paired as if we had played the correct colors. I ended up playing black 5 rounds out of 7. I of course have no one to blame but myself. As to what should have happened, I defer to competent TDs.
I would pair according to the colors the players should have played. Otherwise players could self-help by deciding to switch colors (if they thought of it), timing their colors to their wishes. But I never got beyond LTD (Laughable TD) so I’m no authority.
That’s my preference, too, although I am occasionally overruled.
As you note, to do otherwise is to invite players to pick and choose - and that always leads eventually to abuse.
If and when USCF begins to ask for color information on games, this may require some extra record keeping. Given current software, I would leave the colors “as paired” until after the event, and then change the colors to “as played” before submitting. With luck, when software is re-written to report colors, it will also be changed to separately keep track of colors “for pairing purposes” and “for reporting purposes”.
Pairing using colors “as played” is fraught with problems, quite aside from those involving the players themselves. If a wrong color occurs in round 4 of a 5-round tournament, and the TD pairs round 5 “as played”, one or more innocent third parties may end up with colors (or even opponents) other than those they would have received.
Many years ago an IM from New York City would intentionally sit down at the board against a higher-rated opponent with the Black pieces, regardless of what color he had actually been assigned. When he had been paired as White, if he happened to get a good position with Black, he would say nothing, and just continue the game. But if he ended up with a poor position as Black, he would attempt to get the opponent to restart the game, because they were playing the wrong colors.
Better still, if we’re making requests… Could we upload chess engines onto the USCF server, and let them play out all our rated games for us? I could simply have Rybka play all my games for me in the Cloud. That would save me a lot of time, and I’m fairly sure my rating would go up. Especially if I insist on only playing people using, oh, say, Fritz 4 or Crafty 2.3. :mrgreen:
You’d get near-instantly rated games that way. And just think of all the synapses I could save for other purposes, just for allowing electrons to chase each other around for me instead!
Back to the question of “pair as played” vs. “pair as originally paired”…
Out of curiosity, what does USCF do about this at national scholastics? When we are taking scores, we’re supposed to write down what actually happened, as opposed to what is paired. I assumed we did this so that in the back room they could fix the colors to match what really happened, then pair the next round accordingly, but maybe not?
But an upset game one way or another would do the same thing, right?
We had a older guy who didn’t speak English well, and claimed to find our pairing charts incomprehensible. One round this older guy had black, but insisted to his little-kid opponent that he had white, and played as white. The kid was either too polite or too intimidated to set him straight. If I had paired the next round “as paired” the older fellow likely would have gotten two whites in a row, and the kid two blacks in a row. That doesn’t seem fair.
It would seem like the most reliable way to maximize equal white/black is to pair by what was played. Am I missing something?
