Is it possible to make a points adjustment to a player’s score in the pairing programs?
For example, if for some reason you wanted a result to count for rating, e.g. white wins and so on the crosstable it will be submitted like that for rating purposes, but for pairing and tournament purposes you deducted the point off white (maybe for doing something bad), it would be convenient to have a “score adjustment” field, which would now sit at -1 (minus one) for this player so that he gets paired accordingly, without having to make a manual pairing or adjustment.
I’m also thinking this field should go to tenths of a point, e.g. I have toyed with the idea of giving 0.25 points for a requested bye and leaving a played bye at 0.5 points, to reward players participating in the entire tournament and such. You could record this as a half-point bye with a “score adjustment” of -0.25.
Maybe it could have some other uses by adjusting a players score by 0.01 (or -0.01) points could theoretically move someone to the top or bottom of a score group. (I can’t come up with a reason why you might want to do this though!)
Maybe this feature already exists and I just cannot find it, or maybe nobody else thinks it would be useful.
I would just use a “side games” section for this. Record the result to be rated in the “side games” and do whatever is needed in the actual tournament section. You need to be careful that whatever you do does not cause the players to be paired again in a subsequent round.
This seems like something that would come up extraordinarily infrequently.
I agree that it would be infrequent, and mainly it would be a convenience for such weird things as the “quarter-point bye” idea, but it would take care of the problem you noted above, e.g. leave the game in the main section, adjust the points, and then you can guarantee (hmmm) you won’t pair the players again. Another reason for leaving players in the same section is for the rating bonus points.
If you limit the modifications to multiples of a half point then you could insert an “extra” round and give almost everybody a full point bye with the penalized players getting a half point or zero point bye. If a player is penalized by more than one point then you need additional “extra” round(s).
Swiss-Sys will not allow you to edit score totals (or tiebreaks), presumably because a difference between these and the game results would produce fatal inconsistencies in the database. It’s not my field, but I suspect that programming what you describe would be a lot harder than it sounds.
If fractional scores were allowed, other than a half point, there might be unexpected consequences. For example, typically this would be done for only one player in the tournament. In that case, this player would ALWAYS be the odd player in all future rounds. For example, if his “score” were 3.2 and there were no other 3.2’s, he would be paired against either the lowest 3.5 or the highest 3.0. This would continue throughout the tournament.
How would you like to be this “odd” player, and know that, for the rest of the tournament, you would always be paired against either the highest- or the lowest-rated player in whatever score group you happened to be paired against?
Programming something like this is relatively easy, but it’s unlikely to be done unless there is reasonable demand.
The programming would simply follow the explanations you hear: you separate the scores generated from the games from the scores used for pairings. In most of the (different) systems I’ve heard discussed, TDs talk about one score “for rating purposes” and another score “for pairing purposes”.
first, you write the pairing module to use the “for pairing purposes” score.
second, you provide a facility to make the “pairing” score different than the “result” score.
One key question is: what to do about tiebreaks? Some tiebreaks seem (to me) to depend on scores, and assumptions about how the scores affect your pairings. if pairings are sufficiently different from results…some tiebreaks may be questionable.
There would also be issues related to displaying these different scores in the various reports. Again, I think TDs and Organizers have to come up with consistent ideas on what they WANT. Once that’s done, the programming should not be difficult.
What is difficult is trying to administer some of the jerry-rigged schemes that some people use to do this. when these adjustments are rare, I think the best thing to do is to use the “pairing” scores during the event and keep a separate record somewhere of the differences. At the end of the event, after the prizes have been awarded, go back and change the results to the “true results”. The final crosstable published by USCF will show the correct results for rating purposes, but some people might be confused about some of the pairings - and might wonder why the published prized list is “wrong”.
My second favorite method is to give BYES to the players for pairing purposes (split results can be useful here), and record the actual result in a “Extra Rated Games” section. This has reporting issues, too. People who look at the crosstable wonder about the BYES (so, when the program allows it, it’s considered correct to give “forfeit wins/draws/losses” instead of “full/half/zero point byes”.
Back to programming…doing the coding is not the problem - achieving concensus on WHAT to program is the hard part. Fortunately, we now have a couple of programs written by people who understand how to run an event, and who listen to TDs. UNfortunately, we’re just a bit “at their mercy” - because what they implement is what TDs will end up using.
Given a choice of more features, or a robust implementation of a few features - I’ll take fewer features every time.
There’s also the possibility of having a “fiddle” which affects pairings as well as prizes. For the blitz at the KC Supernationals, everyone played a preliminary RR. The qualifiers took their scores from that into a Swiss, so the players would start “round 1” of the Swiss with different scores.
As Ken says, it’s not hard to program. It’s just that things like that tend to clutter the dialog for entering and maintaining player data. (Note, BTW, that it’s also possible to have tie-break penalties, which is a whole different can of worms).