You’re right. I just looked it up here. http://main.uschess.org/docs/forms/TDCertificationRules.doc (Finding it was hard, “Activities & Interests” is not intuitive at all. I had to search the forums for “TD certification rules”.) An example is
So a club TD can direct 50 players on his own with pairing cards, or 60 players with a computer and an assistant.
I wasn’t before, it was more a joke aimed at JediJoshua’s trite response to my old pairing idea.
But after reading the certification rules I would say that the club TD restriction, for example, lacks all proportion. (I didn’t look closely at the other TD levels but they seem similar.) Any TD who can manage 50 players with cards should be able to manage 100 players with a computer and an assistant. If not more. “Allowing” such a TD to manage 60 players seems like a sop.
Oh, and Ken Sloan’s post seems to be in a strange dialect. Could someone kindly translate it for me?
Hmm, that’s really cool. Two completely different (and almost opposite) situations generate two different pairing techniques, which turn out to be identical!
In one situation, there are too many rounds, so you want to move the “climactic” games to a later round. The answer: decelerated pairings.
In the other, you want to speed up the pairings, to have them ready when the players need them. The answer: decelerated pairings.
On top of that, it turns out that both of these problems tend to arise in the same tournaments, namely, blitz Swisses. Talk about killing two birds with one stone.
As WinTD explains it, with declerated pairings, in round 2 the 1-point score group is paired against the 0-point score group. Rounds 3 and later are paired as usual.
The theory is that whereas accelerated pairings effectively lowers the number of rounds needed to reduce players to one perfect score, decelerated adds one. WinTD gives the example of 8 players in a 4-round tournament as a scenario when this might be useful.
In my limited testing, it does delay by one round when the top two seeds will meet (assuming they win all their early games), which might make the final round more meaningful vs. anti-climactic.
It also essentially accelerates to the 2nd round the time when the top player (by score and rating) will drop one score group to get an opponent.
Does your “robin” play at the end of the table while everyone else rotates? Sounds like “the ghost”, so named since he doesn’t exist if there are an odd number of players. One explanation is here.htm.
I believe I got the round-robin method out of Kenneth Harkness’s The Official Blue Book and Encyclopedia of Chess (1956).
Exactly. “Robin” sits still and switches his/her board for colors every game, the other boards alternate down one side of the table. After finishing each game the other players set up the same colors before moving.
Natch.
I had a hard time even looking at that page. It’s way over-complicating the process. Just sit everybody down and have them play. You can put them on the cross-table in any order.
And I don’t consider two colors in a row to be a problem.
Everyone here should know how to run a full round robin. The discussion was about using a “round-robin guided Swiss” when you don’t have enough rounds to complete a full round-robin, but have too many rounds to run a Swiss (without causing the pairing TD to tear his hair out in the last couple of rounds).
This hybrid form of tournament is relatively obscure - but really should be better known. Especially among local TDs who often find themselves running 5 round events with 8 players.
It is kind of ironic that some of the most complicated pairing situations appear in the smaller tournaments, where the TD is the least experienced. With all of inherited complaints from players about these situations, it is the attitude of the TD that will convey to the players whether the event is being managed as objectively as possible.
The rules cannot cover every situation, nor should it. The number of pages from Harkness’ Bluebook to Just’s edition had to at least tripled (just guessing off the top of my head). The more extensive pages is more of a hinderance to newer TDs than a help. As important as it is to follow rules, the TD must develope the trust of his players. That is often what brings them back to play again, as well as making TD decisions a little easier for players to accept.
I don’t have a problem with two colors in a row, just three in a row or a color imbalance of 4-1 in five rounds.
I wrote the above link last year when I had dreams of rewriting Chapter 12 of the Official Rules. At Dallas I was told my ideas were good but they didn’t correct a serious enough problem to take action on. At any rate, you can click on the “Next Rd” or “Prev Rd” buttons to see how the players move. For more info, take “/rr3.htm” off the above link.
