Please use this topic to post your ‘wish list’ for what should be in tournament management software.
As a base I will be using what we see in WinTD and Swiss Sys but as well all know they each have their +'s and -'s.
What would you like to see in a TMP (tournament management program)?
Be constructive please.
Upon completion this software will be made free to all TD’s.
Thanks,
–Sevan
Well, since I suggested Sevan ask for suggestions, I’ll make a few:
The program should be able to handle the recording and reporting of dues transactions as well as the rating report, including address, birthdate and sex as well as the type of dues transaction, number of years, etc. (This may involve state association dues as well as USCF dues.)
The new upload format (which I really do promise to finalize soon) will have fields for several things not in the current upload format, including (but not necessarily limited to):
Player’s name
Player’s rating (as used for pairing purposes)
Color assignments for each game
In the future we may preassign the 12 digit event ID for some events, for example if it has a TLA. If this occurs, it should be possible to include that information in the upload file somewhere.
This gets a bit complicated with recurring events, the TLA itself may have an ID but a separate ID would need to be assigned each time it is held. Perhaps this field should be called the 'TLA EVENT ID", with the understanding that a separate event ID may be issued when the event is submitted for rating.
Date each round was played. FIDE is still discussing what this means for events with multiple schedules.
FIDE arbiter information. This is separate from the TD list for USCF purposes, because the chief TD for the tournament may not be the chief arbiter for any FIDE rated sections.
Detailed time control information. This is needed to verify that the games were FIDE ratable. Moreover, some events that are FIDE ratable may not be eligible for norms based on the time control.
Mike - can you give me an example where the Chief TD would not be the Chief Arbiter for any FIDE rated sections in a tournament?
–Sevan
Let’s say I decide to hold a Futurity here in Nebraska, bringing in a couple of nearby FMs to play against some of our top local players who aren’t FIDE rated yet.
It’s a single section event.
I’m not a FIDE Arbiter, so I’d have to have one present (or available by phone if needed) to sign off on that event for the FIDE report, but I would want to be shown as the chief TD for USCF purposes, especially if one of my my goals in running a Futurity is to get a category “R” event so that I can qualify to take the ANTD exam. (I think that’s the only requirement I’m missing, though I currently have no interest in becoming an ANTD.)
I got the impression in Turin that FIDE has growing concerns over events that do not have a FIDE-certified arbiter on site, too.
FIDE has concerns even over events where the IA is present - 
(hence an investigation currently into a GM norm event that took place in Bulgaria where potential mass fraud has occurred not only in that event but by multiple participants over a course of time).
I sat in on the last half-hour or so of the FIDE Ethics Committee meeting in Turin, they have a pretty full plate.
I think taking the best from WinTD and SwissSys is a great starting point.
Generally speaking I think people get used to a program faults and all and have to have a really pressing or better feature to change programs.
Having said that I favor SwissSys. And it has most of the features that Mike Mentioned. Fields for state/local/USCF fees. I use this all the time to help balance out the income.
One thing that I feel SwissSys doesn’t handle very well is crossround pairings. I hear that WinTD does a better job of this.
The newest version of SwissSys has a upgraded result module that does prize divison etc. It works fairly well for simpler prize structures.
Something that would be handy is the ability to point to a players result and pull it into a seperate report. Maybe after pulling it to the report the original would be highlighted in red. So you could easily pull data to create the prize announcements.
Example
1st overall John Smith Maybe show tiebreaks also
2nd overall Jill Jones
Top 4th grader Tim Wilson
etc
Top Under 800
Tommy Jones
etc
Top Unrated
Don Smith
etc
Best upset
etc etc
SwisSys may have fields for dues, but can it prepare the upload file needed to submit memberships to the USCF?
A cool feature would be a direct interface to the USCF site, for both fetching the player DBs and for uploading tournament reports. In cases where the report is valid, it could either pop up a window with the payment page or interface with that page as well.
The only problem with this feature is that it will be dependent on changes to the pages/form elements, but any tournament management software is already dependent on file formats.
Membership exception requests and other modifications would still require going to the TD/A.
(Although, it would be a good improvement to the file formats to include the info for some of the common membership exception requests, where possible, and for the TD/A to use the input appropriately)
Well I’m not totally sure. My initial reaction was no. But I went looking and there is a Membership form thing that exports a list that looks like this.
Name: Vick,Test
Address: 123 Street
City: Madeup State: IL Zip:
Phone: Email:
Sex: M Birthdate: 10/01/2000
Status: Renewal Former ID: 33414183 12/31/2006 Family ID:
Affiliate: ID:
Seller: Date:
Type: regular 1 yr
Total paid:
Name: Dender,Arnie
Address: 123 more
City: Anothertown State: IL Zip:
Phone: Email:
Sex: M Birthdate: 10/23/1999
Status: New membership Former ID: Family ID:
Affiliate: ID:
Seller: Date:
Type: regular 1 yr
Total paid:
I made up names obviously. So I quess the question is what is the format that the Membership routine asks for?
I have a couple of things, taking the best of WinTD, SwissSys and also using the FIDE pairing programs:
Creation of a pgn file for the round to enable games to be input against them without having to type all the player and tournament information.
Output the games list with pairing numbers.
Integration with new technology such as MonRoi (oh no, not the “M” word!). For example, the MonRoi system is trying to incorporate a pairing system into it’s Tournament Manager software… I believe it would be better for them to integrate into existing pairing software and have the two systems integrate with each other.
I see WinTD added a “Try to pair same club” feature which would have been very useful to me a couple of years ago. I also love the new "Pair teammates at or above (a specific number of points) feature which allows team tournaments towards the end to continue avoiding pairing teammates unless they are stuck at the top of the standings by themselves, or as in the recent Atlanta NYA, 5 out of the top 6 players at one stage (round 7 of 9) were teammates (K-9).
Maybe a simple remove player function which gives a full point bye to opponents who beat the removed player and a half-point bye to players who drew, instead of having to go and delete all the games played first before the player can be deleted.
FIDE norm calculations - accurately!
That seems enough for now…
Chris Bird
In order to compute FIDE norms, you would have to have the current FIDE Rating List (in addition to the USCF rating list) and FIDE IDs as well as USCF IDs, right? (We have about 2800 USCF IDs that have been linked to FIDE IDs, but as another topic shows there are always going to be some problems keeping a list like that current.)
I may add FIDE ID to the list of fields in the Unified Supplement/Gold Master file, though.
There is an upload file format for memberships as a tab-delimited file, but I think I could probably write a program to extract the necessary data from the sample SwisSys file that was posted.
Besides the ability to create HTML files the ability to edit them.
A mini spreadsheet program to do the tournament $$$ math.
A mini word processor to do signs.
Drop sheets (calculated from data regarding the tables/seating arrangement).
Signs generated from pairings with the players names/ratings/titles and the ability to pick and choose which ones to print.
Drag and drop everyting.
Mouse scroll ability–in fact all the standard mocrosoft abilities (cntrl-p, Cntrl-c, etc…)
Tabs ala browsers
A user friendly help menu.
“undo” menu bar button.
import/export entries from other programs.
More later, I have to go direct a tournament.
Tim
Addition of colors to the single-line crosstable format.
At present, the multi-line (wall-chart) format uses 2 lines per player, and possibly a 3rd line of hyphens to separate each entry from the next. This wastes paper and wall space.
The single-line (“standings”) format presently lacks color information.
Colors could be added to the single-line format in either of two ways:
15 Smythe, Bill 10339022 IL 1850 3.5 W32w L11b W20w D24b W27w
16 Nolan, Mike 10339999 NE 1650 3.0 W33b L12w D13b D30b W29w
Or:
15 Smythe, Bill 10339022 IL 1850 3.5 wbwbw W32 L11 W20 D24 W27
16 Nolan, Mike 10339999 NE 1650 3.0 bwbbw W33 L12 D13 D30 W29
Of these, I prefer the latter. It creates less confusion between W for win and w for white. In addition, including the color history as a single field makes it easier for “pairings-kibitzers” to guess their next-round pairings. For that matter, it would also facilitate lively Forum discussions along the lines of “why did the program make pairing X instead of pairing Y”.
(I have no particular preference as to the order of the fields – ID number, rating, score, results, etc – and I’m not trying to make a statement of any kind in this regard.)
If the single-line format had the option of being printed either in score order (standings) or in ratings order (as on wall charts), organizers who are short of wall space could choose the latter, dispense with multi-line wall charts altogether, and still post color histories.
Bill Smythe
One touch download and update of ratings (if that was in someone’s list already I missed it.)
Besides enhanced ability to calculate prizes, the ability to list prize distributions on the crosstable (and of course output to html and rtf.)
The ability to export this information in a standard format for use in databases at the state and national level to show tournament prize results/standings as well as performance. (For example, USCF crosstables currently display results, but not in prize order.)
Assuming USCF is building the ability to enter tournaments online, an interface (better interface) for importing all this data from USCF (again 1 touch).
Better help files and more context sensitive help.
It would be really nice if it was written for multi-platform to also run under Linux like some of the new open source projects. Linux is getting close to having enough good software to be a viable replacement for Windows, with far more stability and much less overhead. A good full featured pairing software that interacts gracefully both ways with spreadsheet data is one of the few remaining significant holes in my Linux conversion requirements.
Of course, our Mac friends will appreciate this too.
Cheers,
Mike Swatek
I’d like a Mac version too!
One other thing I thought of which I’d like to see. I’d like to be able to take my club file, or USCF database file and have a way for a program to go look at the MSA for updated USCF expirations. Quite often when running a tournament at the start of a new month there are lots of people who have an expiration date of the end of the previous month. Instead of having to look that up manually I’d like to have feature that could see if the expiration date has changed. This way if someone renewed you’d see that change.
We’ve talked about generating some kind of on-demand ‘gold master’-type format, you supply a range of dates and it send you a file with only those members whose ratings or expiration dates have changed in that range of dates.
Because of the time it takes to generate a gold master, we would probably have to email it to you rather than allow you to download it, the same way we handle custom rating lists. However, a full ‘gold master’ file is 20-30 MB, which might be larger than some email systems will accept. With reasonable date ranges (such as back to the last posted Gold Master) that might not be a big problem, though, because a ‘gold master’ update since the 2006 Annual List would currently have about 51,000 records in it, about 1/12 of the number in a full Gold Master list.
Here’s how I quickly do this for 200 player scholastic tournaments today. Before the event, download a custom rating list for the states you expect players from (all members current and past, including unrateds). This will include current expiration dates for all listed with the USCF ID conveniently in the first column. Put the data in an Excel spreadsheet.
After the tournament is loaded in the pairing software (or even before if you import the players), dump the list of all of players in the event, including ID numbers, into another sheet of the same Excel spreadsheet (or even a completely different spreadsheet file). I use WinTD which makes this a simple copy/paste operation (make sure the ID numbers on both sheets land as numbers and not text). Then use the vlookup function using the ID as a key to return the current USCF expiration in a column next to the corresponding players. Then sort by the dates produced in the vlookup column and your short list of players to address membership with is at the top (or bottom).
Cheers,
Mike Swatek
A simpler method may be to cut/paste the IDs into the member lookup form on MSA. This form was recently modified to accept multiple member IDS, either comma or space separated.