Swiss Pairs over two evenings (players in 1-session)
Hi there,
I know a few clubs play swiss pairs events over two consecutive weeks, but I would imagine there's the risk of players only attending one of the sessions. If we were to run an event like this, we wouldn't to restrict this to players who could only make one of the two weeks, but at the same time it could be a good event to run since our club has a very wide range of abilities. Running a one-session event would not be feasible as we typically only play 18 boards per session.
In essence this would work fine and I don't think there would be any issues with submitting an event like this. However, I can imagine there being various scoring adjustments. For withdrawals at the half-way stage, I would be inclined to award around 6 VPs (3.3.9) for each match missed. The bigger issue comes from any pairs arriving at the half-way stage. Obviously 18 VPs may well be a reasonable starting point having missed 3 matches, but it may disadvantage those pairs they end up being drawn against. Would you advise treating these as mismatches, or would you give them an artificial score of e.g. 36 VPs and then take off 18 at the end of the event? Obviously there are no regulations surrounding this exact scenario since it's undesirable, but I'd prefer to know how to deal with this type of situation if it ever occurred.
Comments
I would be inclined to start pairs playing only the second session with an adjustment to exactly 50% VPs. If you have more than one such pair then, as far as possible, they get to play each other in their first match. The initial adjustment is removed at the end for final ranking. Those pairs playing only the first session receive no adjustment for matches missed.
It may be worth thinking about what you hope to achieve by this Swiss Pairs.
You mention that you have a wide range of abilities at your Club.
I wonder if instead of grappling with pairs dropping out or joining into a Swiss Pairs
you could have one evening per month where you split the field into two sections
(based on NGS Grades or results at the Club over the previous month)
That would give people a chance to play mostly against similar standard players if that was your goal
Peter Bushby Suffolk
Hi Peter,
Yes, we managed to organise that for our start of term event yesterday, with 4 tables in Section A and 5.5 tables in Section B. Ideally, we would run this all the time, but numbers don't tend to hold up so well over the course of the year. 7 or 8 tables would probably the expected turnout so you don't really want to host a 2-section event with 4 tables in each (not really enough comparisons to make it worthwhile). But yes, a 2-section format is something else we're considering.
I think the main incentive for running a Swiss Pairs over two weeks is that you will play more than 36 boards in the event and therefore there will be a masterpoint award for each match won. This means that a lot of people who don't usually feature in the masterpoints will get some. Indeed amongst the pairs that are there for both weeks there will be no more than one who will not get masterpoints.
I don't think it is right that a pair that is not there for both weeks should get an adjustment for the matches they miss such that they might feature in the bonus awards. I think these should restricted to those who play both weeks. There is no problem with those who don't come for the second week they just get their masterpoints for the matches they won in the first week. For those who come just for the second week we don't want them to start at the bottom beating up some weaker pairs. So we give them an adjustment at the start of the second week so they start in the right place in the field and then take away this adjustment at the end so that they too will just get their masterpoints for matches won.
You could do what pg10003 says and give them all 10VPs for each match they missed and have them meet other pairs who only come for the second week in their first match but that still runs the risk of having significant mismatches a strong pair might have a couple of easy matches before they play another stronger pair and a weaker pair may have to lose all their matches to get to their level only to be too late to play someone at that level. I prefer to seed the pairs giving them different adjustments so they are in the 'correct' place for their first assignment in the second week. Of course this is subjective but I think it better achieves the objective of having people play against their peers, avoiding mismatches and giving almost everyone masterpoints.
Just a couple of technical points when running such events with EBUScore. In the first week you need to set the number of pairs to be significantly greater than those turning up that week to leave room for the newcomers in the second week. The extra pairs are marked as missing in the first week, as are those in the second week who don't turn up. You also need to use the correct figure for the total entry on which the bonus master points are awarded. I would suggest this is neither the total number of different pairs who played at least one week nor only the total number of pairs who played both weeks but rather the larger of, the number of pairs who played in Week 1 or the number of pairs who played in Week 2 but this is not set out in the Masterpoint Handbook as far as I can see so I stand to be corrected.
I doubt it was intended that anyone could get match awards if they didn't play more than 36 boards.
I agree Gordon, and we would of course motivate people to try to attend both weeks. However, withholding match awards for those attending only one of the two sessions seems unnecessary (particularly since the matches will still be 6+ boards). At the moment this is just a hypothetical scenario, but was interested to see if anyone had experience in running an event like this.
No, I wasn't suggesting withholding them, just commenting.