Chess Pairing Programs

[Alex Holowczak]

I've just tried Vega, and I think the functionality is as good as Tournament Director for individual events, but this handles team events too!

The only real difference is that some of the system output messages have an air of "9 year old who has just discovered fonts" about them, and there are an awful lot of files that make it on to your harddrive. The output is quite iffy too. The English on some messages isn't that great, but then it was written by an Italian. It takes a bit of time to get used to the software, too.

So in summary: Functionality is excellent, presentation a bit unprofessional. For £0, it's excellent.

[Simon Spivack]

I thought that SCID had not been updated for years. I see now that it has. As I recall, the original author, Shane Hudson, had to stop maintaining the project, he supported Windows and Linux versions, due to ill health.

There is a forum on http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/foru ... scid-users . The project itself can be found at http://sourceforge.net/projects/scid/. In the past, unlike Chessbase, it did not crash; unfortunately, for me, the Achilles' heel was the problematic means of updating its databases. With Chessbase, all one does is click and the files are automatically downloaded from the Week In Chess. With SCID one had to go to the WIC website and click on the appropriate links. I presume that commercial considerations prohibit SCID incorporating similar functionality: I'd be interested to know whether this has been addressed.

[Roger de Coverly]

unfortunately, for me, the Achilles' heel was the problematic means of updating its databases.

I'm not sure it's particularly problematic. For years I have used the approach of downloading pgn files from assorted websites (including TWIC) and appending them to an appropriate database. That's particularly useful when, like Hastings, the file of games from the previous day is available the next day or even the same evening.

Perhaps more to the point is that there isn't an annual commercial offering on DVD of several million games in scid format. Downloading "manually" a year's worth of recent TWIC, Britbase or tournament website material isn't especially onerous.

There's also another approach to the SCID's read only approach to pgns.

Here's what the help file has to say

Pgnscid is the separate program that you need to use to convert PGN (portable game notation) files into Scid databases.

To convert a file named myfile.pgn, simply type:
pgnscid myfile.pgn
and the scid database (consisting of myfile.si3, myfile.sg3 and myfile.sn3) will be created. Any errors or warnings will be written to the file myfile.err.

If you want the database to be created in a different directory or have a different name, you can add the database name to the command line, for example:
pgnscid myfile.pgn mybase
will create a database consisting of the files mybase.si3, mybase.sg3 and mybase.sn3.

Note that pgnscid (and scid) can read Gzipped PGN files (e.g. mybase.pgn.gz) directly, so if you have a large PGN file compressed with Gzip to save disk space, you do not have to un-gzip it first.

From the point of view of players who wish to travel light, SCID has the major advantage of being able to be installed without a DVD or even a DVD drive. So in the event of a mid-tournament software or hardware failure, it's relatively simple to restore.

[Simon Spivack]

unfortunately, for me, the Achilles' heel was the problematic means of updating its databases.

I'm not sure it's particularly problematic. For years I have used the approach of downloading pgn files from assorted websites (including TWIC) and appending them to an appropriate database. That's particularly useful when, like Hastings, the file of games from the previous day is available the next day or even the same evening.

Such a merry dance might have driven the late Frank Bridge to compose.

My dedication does not extend to downloading games for each day of the year. Every few weeks I double click to start the Chessbase application. Once the process is running, I click on the appropriate menu and then on the "update games" offering. This will produce three or four TWIC databases. Once I have about twelve of these song collections to sing, i.e. every few months, I combine them into one big chant, delete outpourings that don't meet my requirements and hunt for undesirable duplications. I backup the existing main collection and append the new. Of course there will still be duplicates, which I tackle once per year.

I'm not too concerned about obtaining a comprehensive collection. I don't venture fashionable, razor-sharp openings.

[Malcolm Clarke]

On the subject of pairing players at chess tournaments I had an interesting exercise at the Hampshire Megafinal for the British Land UK Chess Challenge where I did pairings for four of the sections.

Two of the sections consisted of ten and nine players respectively which became a six round Swiss. However by the last round I was able to work out a method of pairing the players, although what I would have liked to have done is to have had a list of the all possible pairings available to me, and chosen the most suitable one based on the player scores.

I would be interested in knowing whether there is any pairing program that I could have referred to here, bearing in mind I would only like to use it for the last round.