If I am going to pair 4 players in a 4 round tournament, is it better to use round robin or swiss pairings in the pairing software?
With 4 players and 4 rounds you’re going to get round robin + 1 repeat, so you might as well make it swiss in the pairing software, but really it doesn’t matter, if they’re A, B, C, D then A will play B, C, D, and one of them again.
There are a few options depending on you the priority of your goals:
o Do you want the top 2 scores replaying in the 4th round?
o Do you mind if players do not equalize colors?
o Are the prizes that matter?
One idea is to pair / play / prizes as a quad and just pair the 4th as if you were play a swiss or to equalize colors as highest priority or replay top two. Also, could offer both end of round 3 prizes and end of round 4 prizes.
I have thought about this as a general Quads+1 as sometimes quads get over with plenty of time left over and it gives a chance for a 4 round norm to be made so whoever you played in round 3 - switch colors and play again.
Our scholastic quads get paired as double games and they play as many as they can - often the lower rated ones get over quick enough to play all 6 games while the upper ones usually are just 3.
Thanks for the Ideas! I am going to run some quads using the JTP program. I want unrated players to be able to get a published rating, so that is the reason I want to pair everyone in 4 games. No real prizes because it is a free tournament, so I am not concerned about that. Low level chess, so rounds should finish fast, so I guess I can just pair as many rounds as can finish in the time frame.
At present, you have to put the game into MUIR as if it was a swiss, but some of the pairing programs will convert a RR event to a Swiss when it creates the 3 DBF files, or as Bryan Tillis calls them, the 3 Amigos.