Reducing congestion at the pairing sheets is at least as significant as the time factor. I’ve worried about someone getting hurt in those stampedes at events far smaller than SuperNationals.
And if players start to rely on the texting system always working, what happens when a message gets lost in transit and the player misses getting his pairing? (As I recall, when we were at the Hyatt Regency in Atlanta for the Youth Action, cell phones didn’t work on the level the playing halls were on.)
I don’t see 140 characters as a major limit, though it could get tight.
That’s 122 - 124 characters, depending on if you have to count the line termination.
If the names were a lot longer, it could get close to 140 characters. Including the IDs for both players seems necessary to me if the message could be going to the coach, there could be two players with similar names on the team, and including the rating of the opponent is always helpful, but the round time could be dropped.
The biggest issue I see, aside from collecting the contact information in the first place (imagine 1000 players in line at Chess Control on Friday morning all waiting to give someone their cell phone number) is how to coordinate pairings done on multiple computers with the database of contact information, especially when the contact information needs to be corrected mid-event (which is a virtual certainty, typos happen.)
Maybe this isn’t much different from Phil collecting the pairings from the computers running the various sections to combine them and post them to the website. I’ll ask him next time I talk to him.
I suppose we would also have to consider allowing multiple contact numbers for each player, such as one for the player, one for the player’s parents and one for the player’s coach. (And if one of those numbers just happens to be Grandma’s number back in Poughkeepsie, who’s to know, right?)
It might be worth bringing this idea up with Tom Doan, this might be something that should be incorporated into WinTD.