Has anyone used Monrad pairing? Is there any advantage to using it over regular Swiss?
I understand that it is better to use when players have a vast rating range. With Monrad, players get opponents closer to their rating. Any thoughts?
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My club uses 1 vs 2, 3 vs 4 pairings for its year long ladder play (one ladder game per week) with a proviso prohibiting rematches unless both players have had four different opponents (reduced to two during the final two months of the ladder season). The top eight on the ladder qualify for a round robin for a traveling trophy.
That works because there is plenty of time for the strongest players to move to the top.
With a shorter Swiss (5 rounds) and the higher chances of draws among higher rated players near the top I can see a significant chance that the top quarter of the field would all give up at least a draw in the first three rounds while the multiple 3-0 players from the bottom three quarters would be competing for first place while never facing any of the strongest 25% of the players.
With 64 players and the higher-rated player winning every game then 1 vs 2 pairings would have players 1 and 33 (by rating) tying for first at 5-0 with #1 facing #2 then #3 (with all 2-0 players having the same color history) then #5 (all 3-0 players [1, 9, 17, 25, 33, 41, 49, 57] having the same color history) then #9 (all 4-0 players [1, 17, 33, 49] having the same color history) then #17 all while #33 faced #34 then #35 then #37 then #41 then #49. Though I would expect nobody in the top 16 to be able to survive the first few rounds without being nicked for at least a draw.
We will have 60 players in this 4-round tournament.
Player ratings range from 1300+ (a few players) to 700-800 (most players), down to 100-200 (the remaining 20%).
Is regular Swiss still better?
The real question is how accurate are those ratings? I assume most of these players are young.
If you do Monrad pairings (1 vs 2, 3 vs 4, etc) then standard Swiss pairing in round 2, you’re still going to have 1300 players vs 750 players and 750 players vs 200 players in round 2.
Might be worth simulating such an event with your pairing program a few times.
I played around with an idea once where you gave the upper quarter .75 points, the next quarter .5 points, the 3rd quarter .25 points and the bottom quarter 0 points, then did standard swiss pairing. For the 2nd round, you subtracted .25 points from the original top 3 groups. For the 3rd round you subtracted another .25 points from the original top 2 groups and for the last round you subtracted the final .25 points from the original top group.
Difficult to do with most pairing programs, though.
60 players with 1 vs 2 pairings and 12 in the 100-200 range means 6 of those 12 at 1-0, 3 of those 12 at 2-0 and 1 of those 12 at 3-0 playing in the final round against another 3-0 near the bottom of the middle group.
If all games are decisive your 4-0 players will include one from the top 16, one from the second 16, one from the third 16 and maybe one from the bottom 12. Since not all games will be decisive a possibly more likely result is having one 4-0 from the middle 20, another from the bottom 20 and no other 4-0 players.
Another idea to toss out there is to make it a technically 5-round Swiss tournament with the top 20 getting a full point bye for round 1, the middle 20 a half point bye and the bottom 20 a zero point bye. Round two will have top 20 wins paired with each other, top 20 draws and second 20 wins in the next group, top 20 losses, second 20 draws and bottom 20 wins in the third group, second 20 losses and bottom 20 draws in the next group and bottom 20 losses in the final group. Think of it as a kind-of acceleration for every round. Run some tests and see if it gives what you want.
My guess is that there are no cash prizes.
Is there some pairing program that you use which has these options or are you manually adjusting? Do you also force the opposite color even when equalization says otherwise? I thought that if equalization becomes ugly enough I might delay the repair and then again it is also a bit like playing in a second tournament which may get you the same color you played the opponent the prior time.
Our ladder ignores colors and for every game players draw pawns to determine the colors. Attendance is not required every week so we just pair that week’s ladder round based on who showed up Decades ago when we were tracking colors there would occasionally be somebody playing one color 70% of the time. We just use a spreadsheet sorted by <1> descending score, <2> descending number of games (promoting participation) and <3> accumulative score. The spreadsheet lists the last four opponents and we just pair top of the ladder with the next player that wasn’t among the last four opponents. And so on. It is not a complex algorithm and can be done manually.
It is a scholastic tournament with no cash prizes.
Somebody will suggest using accelerated pairings - but I would recommend against it for the ratings you gave. Accelerated pairings work best where there is a smooth distribution of ratings or a noticeable break between the top half and the bottom half. When it is used properly it can function as almost the equivalent of having an extra round for the limited purpose of narrowing the top and bottom score groups, reducing some of the gross mismatches involving the highest and lowest rated.\
Working well results in cutting your 2-0 scores in half (from an expected 15 to 7 or 8, with two more rounds remaining to further reduce them). In this particular rating distribution (a lot of closely rated players in the middle 70% or so) there is a realistic risk of increasing the number of 2-0 scores to as high as 22 or 23 (top-half round one losers lose again facing round one bottom half winners).
As far as using non-Swiss pairings goes, that would be a MAJOR variation for most parents (and possibly even some of the new-to-tournament-chess parents) and would need to be in all publicity. Using accelerated Swiss pairings would be questioned and probably accepted, but the rating distribution makes using them questionable and possibly detrimental.
Bite the bullet and go with Swiss pairings. Consider multiple sections (Open, Under 1000, Under 400), with Open and Under 400 each having fewer trophies/medals than the Under 1000 section has. If it is an individual/team (medley) structure with team trophies then the team score can still be the top 3 or 4 scores from a school while using scores from all three sections (no change needed for the team awards regardless of how many sections you opt to go with).
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Parents are driving this because they read that it is a better system than the regular Swiss. Also, since Norway chess uses it regularly, many people think it must be better.
We were not planning to use it for this tournament and did not advertise it as such. It is actually better to know that this system is a major variation and cannot be used unless advertised in advance.
Using the regular Swiss system with more sections or adding class prizes seems to be a better option to me.
Thank you everyone for your valuable insights.
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Team awards across multiple sections is ugly but without it there can be almost no full 4 player teams in each section. I have suggested that some kind of table used to weight the scores in each section (tie breaks can be problematic so care needs to be taken on which ones to use and which ones don’t make as much sense as they do in a single section). I never had to use it but I fooled around with exporting the team standings with tiebreaks and applied the weighting through a table. Of course this works better if no one is playing up a section.
So if I had a 5 round Champ section and a 7 round under section the weighted score might be:
The old Hadley scholastic tournaments had three divisions (Primary K-3, Elementary 4-5 and JH 6-8) with each division having 9 strict rating based sections. The team awards were at the division level while the individual awards were at the section level.
Below is one of those tournaments (easiest one for me to find). All sections within a division had the same number of rounds and there was no section weighting, All players felt that they could contribute equally to the team score regardless of what their rating was.
PS the lag time between the supplement rating versus the live rating is why a number of players have initial ratings higher than the section limit - the rating supplement applicable to the tournament made those players eligible to play in those sections.
The National Scholastic tournaments have Friends and Family tournaments where two players teams have one player in the four round F&F tournament and one player in the 7-round main event. The team standings are based on using only rounds 1 through 4 for both events.