Monday 22 October 2007

Ha! No program can defeat me!

In Australia, the most commonly used computerised swiss pairing program is Swiss Perfect. It is easy to use, and as it was developed in Australia, it was distributed around the country fairly quickly.
However it was never approved by FIDE as an official Swiss Pairing program, which means that for "high level" events, other programs need to be used.
For the 2008 Sydney International Open (for which I am an arbiter) Swiss Manager is to be used. It is an approved FIDE program, and it is connected with chess-results.com website which carries results from most international events held around the world.
It's major drawback is that it isn't as easy to use as Swiss Perfect, in a user-interface way. A week ago I sat down and had a play with it, to get myself ready for next years event. Although most things could be done fairly easily (although entering players can be a nightmare until you know how), I came across one major problem. If I entered a player into the tournament after the first round (as does happen) I couldn't work out how to either (a) give them half point byes for the missed rounds or (b) set some starting score.
Swiss Manager insisted on starting them on 0 points, which mucked up the pairings. But after reading the user manual (no help) and looking on the net (still no help) I found the solution. And for anyone else having the same difficulties with Swiss Manager, here it is.

If you go to the Tournament Data Dialog Screen (either when you set up the tournament, or by choosing Input->Tournament from the menu) and then click on the "Other" tab, you will see an option "Enter results for excluded players (0 as default)" If you check this option then late entries show up in the pairings from Round 1 (paired against "withdrawn") and you can set the result as 1/2-1/2 or 0-0 etc Do this for all the rounds a player has missed and everything should be hunky-dory.

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