I am looking for advice on the best way (in WinTD) to run a Rated-Game-a-Week along with my usual unrated section that is paired using WinTD. Last Monday when I tried this for the first time, I just created two sections, rated and unrated. Now I am preparing for Round 2 rated and a totally new section for my unrateds. When I add a section, it gives me garbage in the field for the first board number, plus it says the new section is currently on Round 100.
I know a lot of you run these Game-a-Week events. Do you have two separate tournament and you have to switch back and forth? Do you add a section like I am trying to do?
Any advice is appreciated. If all else fails, I can re-enter everything from the rated section, since I only had 3 Boards.
Which version are you running. In v4.20 I would not expect that issue. The first board number would default to 101 but there would not be any rounds yet. I donāt know about v5.0x (where x ranges from nothing to the current version number).
I havenāt upgraded to 5.x yet. I am waiting until bug reports seem to be resolved. So my 4.2 version is not behaving as you would predict.
I would think that, if you are running both rated and non-rated sections, it would be smart to run them as two separate tournaments, rather than just separate sections.
For one thing, how do you weed out the non-rated section on your report to U.S. Chess?
Of course, youād have to set the starting board number in one of the tournaments by hand, since the two WinTD files wouldnāt know about each other.
Bill Smythe
There is no need to āweed outā anything. When you set up the tournament just check the box asking if the section is US Chess rated for the rated section(s) and leave it unchecked for the unrated section(s). The information from any section in which this box is unchecked will not be reported to US Chess when you upload the tournament file.
Yes, and I know how to report only the rated section to USCF. I just canāt seem to create a new section for this weekās unrated pairings. I try to give the new section an unused starting board number, but it changes to a 5 or 6 digit number, and the round resets to round 100. 
Iāve never used WinTD, but is it possible to set up, next month, a five section tournament with a rated section and four other sections that you will populate week by week?
Alex Relyea
Interesting option. I will experiment with this.
Hmm, some interesting wrap-around (regarding board numbers and round numbers) is going on here.
Anyway, Iām confused. First of all, I prefer the adjective ānon-ratedā to describe a tournament (or section) that will not be rated by U.S. Chess. The description āunratedā looks as though it might be a tournament or section open only to players without a rating, even if the tournament or section is to be rated by U.S. Chess.
I assume your Rated-Game-a-Week tournament is a single event that has (for example) 5 rounds, one round each Tuesday over five consecutive Tuesdays.
Concerning the non-rated event(s), is this, also, to be a single event spread over multiple weeks, or is there to be a brand new tournament each week, likely with different players from week to week?
In the former case, you donāt have to add āsectionsā every week. You just have to add rounds, one each week, the same as with the Rated event.
In the latter case, each weekās non-rated games could be made into a tournament by itself. There would be no need to combine them, either with each other or with the Rated games.
Bill Smythe
The check-box is for āUSCF ratedā, so the unrated versus non-rated issue is bypassed.
With an earlier version of WinTD that had problems with entering teams/players in large fixed-board team events I would create multiple tournaments and then merge them into one tournament. Once the players were in it went fine. The OP could look at creating virtually empty sections in other tournaments and then merging the tournaments.
Also, Iām guessing youāve already contacted Estima about this. It might be something unusual in your system setup.
For anyone who is interested, this is how the situation was resolved after a lot of experimentation. After creating a practice copy to play with, I added two non-rated sections to use for the two additional club meetings. The errors reoccurred on the new sections. The original two sections (one rated and one non-rated) remained the same. I ignored these errors, added players to one of the new sections, and paired a round. The board and round errors simply disappeared! As best I can determine, the errors were simply a display error and did not have any impact on the real pairings.
At our Monday night event, using the original file, I entered players and paired the rated section for round 2. I ignored the section from the prior week. I entered players into the new non-rated section and paired the 3 or 4 rounds that they played. No problems whatsoever.
The final moral of the story may be to avoid panicking if the display shows something weird (even after the usual closing, rebooting, etc.)
Thanks for the input.
Did you already have a round in the āratedā section before creating the āunratedā sections?
Aha, just as I expected. The rated section covers multiple weeks with one round per week. By contrast, each weekās club meeting is treated as a separate non-rated ātournamentā, probably with different players each week. And if two players show up for the second ātournamentā that were paired against each other in the first, then they might even be paired against each other again.
I think the confusion between different rounds and different tournaments may have wreaked a bit of havoc with your pairing software.
Bill Smythe
If not the players.
Rated/unrated is completely irrelevant. (As noted above, itās just a checkbox, and WinTD actually will double check before doing the US Chess report if the section did not have the US Chess rated box ticked).
The only thing I can see that might cause that behavior is overrunning the field for the section abbreviation. That has a limit of 10 characters, but at one point (it was fixed a few v4 revisions ago), there was no interface check to make sure that wasnāt exceeded. With version 4, the sections were fixed format binary, and the ārounds pairedā came right after the section abbreviation.
Thanks. I was not aware of the limit on the section abbreviation.
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