I agree. In addition, some other things need to be made clearer as well, such as what draws exist in blitz.
It used to be explicitly stated in the rulebook that scorekeeping is not required in quick chess but when rule 5C was rewritten in 2011 (and became official January 1, 2012), it was simply put as a TD Tip, which was a mistake in my opinion.
If you submit a tournament for validation, and you submission ends up with no errors, but has warnings and alerts, there is a file that you can view to see generally what to do with the warnings and alerts. It is possible you may need to call the USCF office in certain cases.
Why d0? Having no increment or delay is generally not recommended.
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Agree.
I hate d/0 – In the oldie days I got scorned by an opponent for not resigning in a 5/0 where I was dead lost but he had just taken a long time (20? seconds) to figure out the winning combo and he only had about 15 seconds left and there was no way he was going to get checkmate in that amount of time – I had a bunch of desperate rook checks and a rook sac that made it physically impossible.
I do not like any delay of less than 5 seconds even in quick.
I run all my regular rated tournaments with a 10 second delay and I think that helps keep some of the crazy time scrambles or just trying to flag you opponent out of the game. I probably should just do increment and take the chance of a real long game – in practice they don’t happen often in the G/60 range.
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Maybe I missed it but what is the total time you have available for the tournament?
I think this really impacts what options are available and reasonable.
We regularly do 3 hour windows and sections with low rated (under 600) and 1st timers that we complete 5-8 Regular rated games of G/25;d5 – for 6 players they would be set up to play 5 games and use the “HEX” pairing - but instead of waiting for the entire round to be complete as soon as a match that hasn’t been played yet has their players waiting it gets played. Newbies and low rated students seldom use all their time and 5 hours of chess games usually gets done in less than half the time. The worst case is that everyone takes the full time and you only get 3 games in for each player. We have found that almost no one cares about USCF quick ratings and they tend to confuse newbies.
If the players can record moves so they can go over later that is a great to learn by review! Even if they have to use the circle the pieces/squares sheets.
I have attached pdf for beginners scoresheets and Hex tournament.wall chart/pairing.
Good luck with whatever you decide.
BeginnerScoresheet 2.pdf (878.3 KB)
RR 6 Both Charts BW.pdf (17.7 KB)
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Thanks so much! I may use those beginner scoresheets with new students we haven’t started teaching handwritten chess notation to yet. Especially the ones in pre-k who can’t write yet!
Because of all your responses I’m considering doing longer games.
I didn’t see any rules against tournament games being spread out over days or weeks (unless I missed it), therefore that may be my solution.
Many clubs run one-game-a-week or even one-game-a-month events.
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You may host a tournament over a month, let’s say, but that might be if you were playing G/90, d/0 or more. If you had the tournament in 2 days, a week apart, or 2 days in a row, then having longer games seems more appropriate. If you had your games to be G/30, d/5, then they could keep score until they have less than 5 minutes on either side because at that point they are allowed to not keep score. Then you could split up the days of the tournament into 2, or even 3 days if you think that all players will show up all 3 days. I wonder, though, if talking about the games before the end of the tournament constitutes helping your players play chess during the tournament. If it doesn’t, then you are all set.
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My club’s annual G/15;d3 quick tournament has four rounds in just over two hours (19 players last time).
I may have read too quickly but it sounds like you have four virtually guaranteed players and two more plausible. Four players leans towards three rounds being best to avoid rematches, but if it is known upfront then rematches are plausible to get that critical fourth game for new players.
The commonly known pairing trap for a four round and six player event is when it ends up in two three player groups with each in one group playing each of the other group during the first three rounds. That leaves only in-group pairings to avoid rematches but only two of each groups players can be paired inside the group with the remaining player from each group playing a rematch.
Example (from highest rated A to lowest rated F)
Rd1 (one upset win)
A 1-0 D
E 0-1 B
C 0-1 F
Rd 2 (transposition so colors work perfectly) (one upset win)
B 1-0 A
F 1-0 E
D 0-1 C
Rd 3 (colors work perfectly - A/C/E are each paired against B/D/F)
C 0-1 B
A 1-0 F
E 0-1 D
Rd 4 (B 3-0, A/F 2-1, C/D 1-2, E 0-3)
B vs F
C vs A
D vs E (unavoidable rematch)
The most obvious red flag is when colors work perfectly in both rounds two and three. That automatically means that the three players with White in round one are in a group playing each of the three players that were in the group that was Black in round one. After two rounds there are six possible sets of opponents in round three with one of those six dividing the six players into two groups of three. If you can pair round four without a rematch then you can automatically pair round five without a rematch (you might see a 4-0 playing a 0-4 but at least there is no rematch). Note that the same risk exists with a five-player four-round Swiss with the de facto sixth player in one of the groups being “bye”.
Some pairing programs have the option of a round-robin directed Swiss. That looks at the Swiss pairings (maybe after round two) and identifies the round robin participants from that. It then ensures that the round three pairings are from one of the three remaining rounds in the round robin pairings.
I had 8 players. I tried entering the report and failed miserably. Since this post is getting so long I’ll write one about entering the report.