Is this a reasonable movement?
Was playing in a 4-table pairs event (4 rounds of 6) and the TD arrowswitched the last round.
According to my calculation this meant that each pair in fact only competed against three other pairs. e.g. pair one only competed against pairs 4,7 and 8.
Thinking about it, as you do, I thought it might be better so that we had 8 rounds of 3 - the first four rounds played with boards 1-12 and the second four rounds played with boards 13-24 - with only the last round arrowswitched.
4 table 8 round 1 winner Share and relay Mitchell
2,4,24,3,8,0
1,5,1,1,8,2,1,7,3,1,6,4,1,5,5,1,8,6,1,7,7,6,1,8
2,6,2,2,5,3,2,8,4,2,7,1,2,6,6,2,5,7,2,8,8,7,2,5
3,7,4,3,6,1,3,5,2,3,8,3,3,7,8,3,6,5,3,5,6,8,3,7
4,8,1,4,7,2,4,6,3,4,5,4,4,8,5,4,7,6,4,6,7,5,4,8
There are of course Howell movements, but the club prefers Mitchells. At least this gets 24 boards in rounds of 3 and, I believe, is fairer than the original movement. The main disadvantage is to remember to change the boards at half-time.
Even simpler would be to have the option to arrowswitch half the boards in the last round (only suitable for an even number of boards) - but the TD would have to remember to warn the players to do so.
No doubt you could set this up as a two-session event, but having a single movement seemed easier.