A lot of scholastic tournaments and some adult tournaments do floor pairings for the first round when 1 or more opponents don’t show up. What if the following happened? 2 Players are repaired against each other, they play only about 6 moves, and 1 of the missing opponents shows up [no other missing players show]. What would you do?:
A) Let the floor pairing stand, and give the late arriving player a forfeit win.
B) Let the floor pairing stand, and give the late arriving play a half point bye (for showing late).
C) Go back to the original pairings with time deducted from the late player’s clock, and give a forfeit win to the other player that was (& still is) missing the initial opponent.
D) Some other decision/action.
This might also make someone ask how long to wait before doing floor pairings.
I misunderstood this rule the second or third year that I directed at the World Open in that I thought that the re-pairing was forced on the players whose opponents were late. Not so according to Bill Goichberg: the players are entitled to wait a full hour and win their games by forfeit instead of playing someone else. The re-pairing is optional. Some players want the point and others just want to play chess.
The CCA answer is (A), except the player gets a full point bye instead of a forfeit win (amounts to the same thing), and he/she only gets the bye if the TD can’t find someone else for him/her to play.
I think the rules are fairly clear on what to do if the round is re-paired. The original pairing is A1 vs. B1 and A2 vs. B2. Suppose both B players are late. The new pairing is A1 vs. A2 and B1 vs B2. Very well. Start the round. A1 is paired vs A2 and they are both present. B1 is paired vs. B2, and neither is present.
At this point, the round begins, following the announced re-paired pairings, and it is irrelevant that it was once paired differently. If one or both of the B players shows up, then the rules for “both players late” are applied.
What I am wondering is whether the re-pairing is considered proper at all. There are rules for late players. Why aren’t those rules followed? At the very least, it’s a non-standard pairing variation. (ETA: I see that the CCA approach covers this, because they announce that they are using the non-standard variation in the advance publicity. I think the CCA approach is very sensible, but difficult to apply in shorter time control events. In the case of a G120 or longer game, I might allow the possibility that all players who win on time forfeit after their opponent is one hour late may be paired against each other in an “extra games” section, with a G90 time control.)
Here’s how I handled this situation at the last tournament I directed. It was a U1000 section, no age restrictions. Mostly kids. About 1/4 adults. When two players didn’t show up, I informed their opponents that they should start the clocks for their absent players (after making a move for white in the case that the black player was absent), and then the two players who were actually present should play each other in an unofficial (and unrated) game . If one of the opponents arrived, then the person paired in that game would have to quit the unofficial game, and go back to the other game.
There are downsides to this approach, but it seemed the most true to the rules, while still allowing people to play Chess.
Another concern is unrated players in a four-round event who have a first-round opponent that doesn’t show up. If they are not re-paired then they will not get an official rating that they entered the tournament with every (quite reasonable) expectation of getting.
I handled one fourth-and-final-round forfeit against an unrated by having an early finisher play an extra cross-round game against the unrated. You don’t always have time for something like that.
Cross-sectional games (or other extra games) can handle no-shows, but they are still ways of re-pairing for no-shows and I detest the idea of cancelling a game that I set up to be USCF rated (though I have no qualms about cancelling a game that may have gone 20 or 30 moves or more if it wasn’t one that was paired - such as at one Chicago Open where a player accidentally sat down in the wrong section and played for almost an hour before the correct opponent showed up for the game).