Southend

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John Wright
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Re: Southend

Post by John Wright » Sun Mar 31, 2013 4:06 am

Tournament Director is being used. I have mentioned this thread to the controllers.

Alex Holowczak
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Re: Southend

Post by Alex Holowczak » Sun Mar 31, 2013 9:13 am

John Wright wrote:Tournament Director is being used. I have mentioned this thread to the controllers.
If it's being used to do the pairings, then that makes a lot of sense. Tournament Director doesn't do pairings correctly, in my experience.

Ian Hunnable
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Re: Southend

Post by Ian Hunnable » Sun Mar 31, 2013 1:58 pm

I am the Arbiter running the Southend Congress and can answer the questions posed.

I am using Tournament Director set for FIDE pairings for the FIDE-rated Open and have downloaded the FIDE rating list into TD.

There are in fact five Swiss pairing systems authorised by FIDE, see:

http://www.fide.com/fide/handbook.html? ... w=category

However, Tournament Director only uses ONE of these which is described on the Tournament Director website:

http://www.tournamentdirector.co.uk/fid ... ystem.html

In view of the comments which have arisen, following the Congress I shall be contacting Neil Hayward to suggest that ALL the approved systems should be programmed, for the Controller to choose which to apply.

I shall not have time to respond to any replies until after the congress.

Ian Hunnable

Alex Holowczak
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Re: Southend

Post by Alex Holowczak » Sun Mar 31, 2013 3:53 pm

Ian Hunnable wrote:In view of the comments which have arisen, following the Congress I shall be contacting Neil Hayward to suggest that ALL the approved systems should be programmed, for the Controller to choose which to apply.
The fifth of those is most relevant:

http://www.fide.com/fide/handbook.html? ... ew=article

Tournament Director (Neil Hayward ENG) Dutch System

Tournament Director claims to be pairing to the Dutch System, which is fine. Those are the rules Jack and I implemented (with varying degrees of success :oops: ) manually, and we got different pairings. I don't think it's a case of Tournament Director pairing to the "wrong" system. I think it's a case of Tournament Director not implementing the Dutch System correctly.

Sean Hewitt
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Re: Southend

Post by Sean Hewitt » Sun Mar 31, 2013 5:11 pm

I think the round 3 pairings are correct. The thing that made them look wrong was the PIN numbers - which appear to be based on ECF gradings, though I haven't checked. They are not based on FIDE ratings.

Ed Player could not float down in R3 having had the float in R2, so a transposition with Ledger is correct.

Alex Holowczak
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Re: Southend

Post by Alex Holowczak » Sun Mar 31, 2013 5:20 pm

Alex Holowczak wrote:Those are the rules Jack and I implemented (with varying degrees of success :oops: ) manually, and we got different pairings. I don't think it's a case of Tournament Director pairing to the "wrong" system. I think it's a case of Tournament Director not implementing the Dutch System correctly.
And you know what, Tournament Director may well be right after all. :D

I've just been looking through the tournament, and Jack and I both gave Player the downfloat. Which would be correct if Player hadn't already had a downfloat in the previous round, which I never even bothered to look for.

Jones [W]
Howell
Hebden [W]
Wells
---------
Ghasi [W]
Cherniaev
Bates [W]
Ledger, D. [W]
Player [W]

So from here:
Jones v Ghasi
Cherniaev v Howell
Hebden v Bates
Ledger v Wells
Player float

So there are two swaps:
(1) Player can't float, so we swap Ledger with Player.
(2) Swap Bates and Cherniaev, as before, for colour reasons.

So you end up with:
Jones v Ghasi
Bates v Howell
Hebden v Cherniaev
Player v Wells
Ledger float

Which is what Southend got. So the pairings look right to me after all!

Maybe Tournament Director can do pairings right for FIDE events, then. CAA pairing mode doesn't, but that's far more challenging to program. My earlier accusations are rescinded.

Richard Bates
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Re: Southend

Post by Richard Bates » Sun Mar 31, 2013 11:31 pm

Alex Holowczak wrote:
Alex Holowczak wrote:Those are the rules Jack and I implemented (with varying degrees of success :oops: ) manually, and we got different pairings. I don't think it's a case of Tournament Director pairing to the "wrong" system. I think it's a case of Tournament Director not implementing the Dutch System correctly.
And you know what, Tournament Director may well be right after all. :D

I've just been looking through the tournament, and Jack and I both gave Player the downfloat. Which would be correct if Player hadn't already had a downfloat in the previous round, which I never even bothered to look for.
But why did Player float in round 2? ;)

The pairings may all be "right", but the pairing rules still suck! Clearly not having had much experience of FIDE pairings in the past, the impression is given that they don't care about colours at all (eg. in round 6, Eames and Ledger were both given the 'wrong' colour, possibly to avoid Jones floating for a second time. Eames also given a repeat colour despite (I thought) having "priority" as the higher score player. CAA pairings are easy to work out in comparison.)

Alex Holowczak
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Re: Southend

Post by Alex Holowczak » Mon Apr 01, 2013 8:35 am

Richard Bates wrote:Clearly not having had much experience of FIDE pairings in the past, the impression is given that they don't care about colours at all (eg. in round 6, Eames and Ledger were both given the 'wrong' colour, possibly to avoid Jones floating for a second time.
The logic is that if you have a scoregroup of 8 players, 1 v 5, 6 v 2, 3 v 7, 8 v 4 are the set of pairings you want in a perfect world. Once you have those, you then work out who has to play which colour, and you can make transpositions if necessary in order to avoid two black-seekers getting black and two white-seekers getting white, for example. There are absolute limits in place too, for example, no player can have three blacks (or whites!) in a row. Colour takes a lower priority than it does with CAA Pairings.
Richard Bates wrote:Eames also given a repeat colour despite (I thought) having "priority" as the higher score player. CAA pairings are easy to work out in comparison.)
Let me explain. I know this because I looked it up - Mark Hebden had a similar question at the Birmingham Rapidplay.

With CAA pairings, the higher score gets preference. With FIDE, you go back through colour history to see who gets their colour.

Eames: BWBWB
Ghasi: WBBWB

Both Eames and Ghasi are -1, so are due white. In rounds 3-5, both players went BWB. In Round 2, Eames had W and Ghasi had B. This is the last time in the history of the event they had different colours. Therefore Eames gets B and Ghasi gets W. So the correct pairing of Eames and Ghasi is Ghasi v Eames, which is what Tournament Director (which is rapidly going up in my estimations!) got.

Here are the Dutch System colour rules, with the key one emboldened:

E Color Allocation rules
For each pairing apply (with descending priority):
E.1 Grant both colour preferences
E.2 Grant the stronger colour preference
E.3 Alternate the colours to the most recent round in which they played with different colours
E.4 Grant the colour preference of the higher ranked player
E.5 In the first round all even numbered players in S1 will receive a colour different from all odd numbered players in S1

E4 (the rule you expected to happen) is number 4 on the list of priorities if you had the FIDE pairings, but is number 3 on the CAA colour allocation priorities. I don't even think E3 exists as priority 4 in CAA rules, but I can't remember.

Sean Hewitt
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Re: Southend

Post by Sean Hewitt » Mon Apr 01, 2013 3:08 pm

Richard Bates wrote:But why did Player float in round 2? ;)
Now that's a good question. My best guess (and that's all it is) is that they did the round 2 pairings manually and floated the wrong player. Ed looks like he may well have been the median player and so would have been due the float under English CAA pairing rules - but not under FIDE pairing rules.

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IM Jack Rudd
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Re: Southend

Post by IM Jack Rudd » Mon Apr 01, 2013 4:35 pm

E3 no longer exists in CAA rules; it used to, in the place it occupies in that list. (Or, sort of - the rules acted in a rather different way, asking you to find a colour-transfer first, and picking Eames as a better choice for a colour transfer than Ghasi on the logic explained earlier.)

Andrew Bak
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Re: Southend

Post by Andrew Bak » Mon Apr 01, 2013 10:34 pm

@GMGawain wrote:Won't be visiting Southend again any time soon. An incompetent arbiter and very unpleasant opponent end the tournament on a very sour note.
OO-er :?

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Christopher Kreuzer
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Re: Southend

Post by Christopher Kreuzer » Mon Apr 01, 2013 10:41 pm

Andrew Bak wrote:
@GMGawain wrote:Won't be visiting Southend again any time soon. An incompetent arbiter and very unpleasant opponent end the tournament on a very sour note.
OO-er :?
Oh dear. I wonder if we will hear all sides of the story? Or any of the story at all?

Richard Bates
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Re: Southend

Post by Richard Bates » Mon Apr 01, 2013 10:41 pm

Sean Hewitt wrote:
Richard Bates wrote:But why did Player float in round 2? ;)
Now that's a good question. My best guess (and that's all it is) is that they did the round 2 pairings manually and floated the wrong player. Ed looks like he may well have been the median player and so would have been due the float under English CAA pairing rules - but not under FIDE pairing rules.
That would have been my "guess" as well. The pairings were issued on pairing boards for the first two rounds, but as a computer printout from then on. The official tournament controller also changed from round 3 onwards. The floater in round 2 was the source of my throwaway comment about the "unpredictability" of the round 3 pairings (although the subsequent discussion has only reinforced my impression that in general FIDE pairings are utterly unpredictable for players. Partly because of the basic workings of the system, and partly because they seem to rely excessively on a detailed knowledge of what has happened previously in the tournament ie. specific colour sequences and float history. Considering the complexity it perhaps is not surprising that computer pairings are far more common in FIDE paired tournaments than CAA paired ones. I don't think this (players struggling to understand the system) is a good thing).

Andrew Bak
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Re: Southend

Post by Andrew Bak » Mon Apr 01, 2013 11:02 pm

For those not on twitter:
@GMGawain wrote:Will update the website about it tomorrow. Basically the arbiter didn't know the 10.2 rule which cost me £920.
Ah, for the love of increment...

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IM Jack Rudd
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Re: Southend

Post by IM Jack Rudd » Mon Apr 01, 2013 11:06 pm

Sorry, Richard, meant to reply to your post and accidentally deleted it instead.