What the best practice with siblings in the same section?
I once read an account from former Women’s World Champ Kosteniuk that when she and her sister went to tournaments the TDs paired them in the first round.
Is it a good idea to give them both a 1/2 point bye in round one and have them not play (assuming the siblings playing each other is a problem).
What if there is a legitimate and serious concern about collusion between the siblings?
In a Swiss, it’s usually best to avoid family pairings in the early rounds. Normally this can be done with a minor transposition.
Later in the tournament, it may be better not to avoid such pairings. As an extreme case, the siblings may be tied for 1st at 4-0 going into the 5th (and last) round.
Bill Smythe
Ok, so avoid pairing siblings until the last, or penultimate round. And how do you address the situation where when one has 3.5 and the other 4, that some force (parents…) will dubiously affect the result?
Ban the parent from the room. Then let sibling rivalry take it from there.
The parents keep a close eye on the pairings, and the kids stay close to the parents.
Surely there must be a more gracious way than banning the parents from the playing area and wall-chart area?
You’re not going to be able to stop it really without getting ubber-draconian.
I’m not trying to be combative here, but is pairing them in round one uber-draconian?
What do you do Sevan? You run many large and successful tournaments.
I personally don’t pair them in the early rounds and just tell parents that the possibility will exist that in the later rounds they have to play together.
Does the possibility of collusion in a final round exist? Sure does. No different than if friends are in the final round though.
Gracious, yes–Sane, no.
Rob Jones
If I am aware of siblings in one section, I give each an identical team code and turn on the plus two rule in the pairing software. I also look for any undesirable effects of this in my QC checks before posting each round’s pairings. The paying parents seem to accept that I’ll make efforts to avoid a pairing of siblings, but that there are limits to these efforts.
I have seen the check box for plus 2 pairings but I don’t know what it means. What is the plus 2 pairing variant?
Plus 2 pairings mean that if the players in question, say on the same team, are in a score group less than plus 2, then they will not be paired with each other. If they are in the plus two group or higher, the score group will be paired normally. For those who don’t know, plus 2 simply means the score group has two more wins than losses, i.e. 2-0, 2.5-.5, 3-1, etc.
Alex Relyea
Alex,
I think that is not the correct explanation of plus 2. I believe the key is that if the score group is plus 2 or higher then you don’t go out of the score group to avoid pairing teammates. So, if there are four players at 3-1 and two are on the same team and no one has played anyone else, then the teammates will not be paired. On the other hand, if two teammates are 4-1, they will play each other.
In combined team tournaments, I always have plus 2 on. I also turn on minus 2. It helps avoid weird pairings that can occur if one team has a lot of players at the bottom of the standings.
Mike
If you’re referring to SwissSys, this is correct. Normally, if you configure SwissSys’s pairing rules not to pair teammates, then SwissSys will treat any such pairing as illegal (specifically, as though the two players had already met). That means that SwissSys will break up a score group to avoid pairing teammates if it can find no other way to pair the group. The “plus 2” variation means that SwissSys will still try to avoid pairing teammates, but it will not break up a score group if it can not find pairings satisfying that constraint.
I’m guessing this is actually what Alex meant when he said “pair the score group normally.”
With WinTD I’ll often select “no” on pairing teammates and then review the late round pairings. If the top (or bottom) score group(s) is broken up I can then delete those few boards and repair them with the setting set to “only if necessary”. One time I set it to “yes” to allow pairing teammates to avoid a final round “only if necessary” making a 300+ point transposition to avoid a teammate pairing (I ran it by the chief TD before doing it).