Why on earth do all the scores at SuperNationals have six decimals of zeroes at the end? Is there a way to score something other than 1, 0.5 or 0? Perhaps some kid thinks he can earn a nano-point for being up a queen until he fell for back rank mate.
PLEASE GET RID OF ALL THESE DECIMALS!
Michael Aigner
We were going to award style points like in figure skating.
The round 2 pairings seem to have corrected this issue.
It could have been tiebreaks.
Way back when I first started playing in tournaments, the organizers of the Western Open in Milwaukee would mail out final crosstables to all the participants. All the final scores were listed as, for example, 3.5132241. This could have meant a final score of 3.5, with 13 median tiebreaks, 22 Solkoff tiebreaks, and 41 S-B tiebreaks.
That way, a computer (mainframe) could easily sort by score, and by tiebreaks within equal scores.
Bill Smythe
I think it was more likely due to the fact that the page had pairings but no results for that first set of reports. It’s probably a WinTD formatting issue, but not one we would see very often.
They were juggling three releases of WinTD to try to get the best mix of features and stability with the established procedures for posting information. It took a couple of tries to figure out which ones to use for what.
That makes sense. Thanks, Tom, and keep up the good work.
I also know that some of the printed standings were produced with a cut and paste from WinTD to Excel.
Mike Regan
They may need to do that with the teams because of penalties imposed on teams. If you do that, you need to make sure to format the score and tie break cells to one decimal place. They copy as “real” not as text, and Excel by default will generally show them with the smallest representation possible, so 17.0 will be 17 while 17.5 will be 17.5.
That cut-and-paste is also the easy way to get prizewinner lists formatted for posting prior to the awards ceremony and for reading at the awards ceremony. For example, to use a random number, if individual trophies in a section are awarded to the top 20 places and ties, you can paste the individual prizewinner list into Excel, bold the bottom border of the row with the 20th place finisher, and the person reading the list at the ceremony can see at a glance who gets the generic “tied” trophies and who gets the original top-20 trophies.
When the day comes that tablet computers replace paper, crayons, scissors, and glue for pre-schoolers, will the virtual metaphor of “cut and paste” hold meaning anymore?
I’ve always found that a Sharpie works just as well for that.
The WinTD output for the “tied for the last overall but ineligible for class prizes” goes into a separate block of “Consolation prizes” at the end, and they did a copy and paste to move that up to the end of the overall prizes.
Ctrl-A, Ctrl-C and Ctrl-V probably are at least as fast as a Sharpie. You also don’t have to draw the line 11 times that way - meaning 11 fewer chances to deface the print on the page. 
The procedure is actually a little different than that since we reguard the “tied fors” as higher than the class prizes. So we cannot use the standard WinTD report and have to do it a little different way - otherwise “tied fors” end up int he class prize sections in error.
That’s certainly what I intended to convey. The + ties handling was originally a quickie fix for an earlier nationals when the consolation awards really were just “sorry-the tie break gods were against you this time” awards.
It already doesn’t. How many of today’s under-20 crowd has ever cut and pasted with scissors and glue?
Bill Smythe
On the contrary – the advent of computers and cheap printers allows teachers to print many pages of notes and pictures, then they have students cut-and-paste into their notebooks.
Teachers still use such “anachronistic” methods. My nine-year-old son frequently brings home projects and assignments where manual assembly is heavily featured. Judging from the results slips I tried to decipher this last weekend, I rather suspect that penmanship requirements will be extinct before paper and scissors.
Sorry, Boyd. Next time, I’ll be a bit more vigilant about that. I did require some kids to rewrite the top section in block letters because their cursive was unreadable, but in retrospect I should have done it more in the early rounds.
And then we have the creative one who played on board XXV in the K-XII open. Then we had the person who (in round one - I hope he got it figured out after that) put the section as 132-149.