Swiss Manager Questions?

[John Upham]

Today I have downloaded Swiss Manager (courtesy of Tim Wall) for the first time to use for an EJCOA junior tournament on Sunday.

Hopefully four days will be sufficient to figure out how to use it.

Is there anyone in this place who can help should I get stuck?

[Roger de Coverly]

Is there anyone in this place who can help should I get stuck?

Many arbiters swear by it or possibly at it.

A feature tha;s very easy to use on utuswiss which can be a cause of immense frustration wuth Swiss Perfect is how to handle the situation where someone withdraws or wants a bye and tells you about five seconds after you've told the software to "publish" the pairings. Another is where plyers sit at the wrong board or play with the wrong colours and you don't find out unyil the round has been played.

[John Upham]

Is there anyone in this place who can help should I get stuck?

Many arbiters swear by it or possibly at it.

A feature tha;s very easy to use on utuswiss which can be a cause of immense frustration wuth Swiss Perfect is how to handle the situation where someone withdraws or wants a bye and tells you about five seconds after you've told the software to "publish" the pairings. Another is where plyers sit at the wrong board or play with the wrong colours and you don't find out unyil the round has been played.

Thanks Roger.

My intention is to use both UTU Swiss and Swiss Manager for the same tournament (assuming I can fathom out how to use Swiss Manager in time.)

I am working my way through several YouTube videos in some degree of English to avoid RTFM.

Clearly if the pairings from each differ then I will be forced to chose which one to be the one we stick with.

At the very least I can compare functionality side by side using my two different HP laptops.

On Sunday I won't have anyone to ask should strange scenarios occur but I will attempt to practise withdrawals, wrongly reported results, swapping between age categories and other typical matters that plague junior events in the next couple of days.

Dealing with these things in UTU Swiss is easy on the grounds I know how to deal with them.

I've never used Swiss Perfect and don't know anyone who has.

As usual, pairing boards and cards will be in the car just in case.

[James Toon]

I found IA Tania Karali's June 2020 Swiss–Manager User's Guide to be clear and helpful.
http://swiss-manager.at/unload/swiss_ma ... _guide.pdf

[John Upham]

I found IA Tania Karali's June 2020 Swiss–Manager User's Guide to be clear and helpful.
http://swiss-manager.at/unload/swiss_ma ... _guide.pdf

James,

Much appreciated.

I attempted to watch the various YouTube videos and so far have failed to find one that was even slightly useful. Most of the videos had a computer voiced cursor entering "xyz" into dialogue boxes with zero explanation. Hopeless.

I can't imagine anyone (even from the Ceylon Chess Federation) obtaining any value from the videos.

[John Upham]

Having spent my first day attempting to use Swiss Manager I can report that my initial frustration lies with the process of adding players to a tournament from an existing rating list.

Both the ECF and FIDE rating lists have been imported successfully.

I have resorted to adding players manually.

Does anyone have detailed knowledge of importing via the rating lists?

[Alex McFarlane]

Hi John,

You can enter a partial name into a box on the bottom right and them select the correct one from the large window at the top (having accepted the rating lists you require).

However, it is also possible to enter all of the details from a spreadsheet in one go. Having done that you can then check the rating details were correct.

This is not the most user friendly program, especially when error messages come up in German.

[John Upham]

For each player record there is a field in Swiss Manager called "Graduate"

Any idea what this is for?

There are others called "Group" and "Type" and "Source" Are these something to do with blood?

[James Toon]

Tania Karali's user guide explains two of these fields (Type and Group) in chapter 13. In researching the others I came across the official Swiss-Manager manual, which seems to have been last updated in 2014. http://swiss-manager.at/unload/swissmanagerhelp_eng.pdf.
All the fields are listed in the section "Input of Participants".

Graduate
This seems to be the same as "Title", e.g. GM, IM etc. No explanation is given for why both these fields are included.

Group
This user-defined field can be used in various ways but probably the most common is to define the sections within a tournament, e.g. Open, Major. This enables Chess-Results to display the separate sections as sub-groups of the same event within one overall event website.

Type
This is used to describe age categories. e.g. U12, U14 etc. This is useful if you want to include age-related prizes.

Source
This describes the rating list from which the player was entered. In this case it will be ENG.

Some of these will be populated automatically when you input data from a list.

More generally, if there's something you have to know about Swiss–Manager, and no-one here can help, you could ask the program creator, Heinz Herzog. His contact details are listed at https://chess-results.com/Kontakt.aspx?lan=1. His preferred languages are English and German.

[John Upham]

Thanks James: much appreciated.

[Alex McFarlane]

I'm not sure I would use group in the way suggested.
Where I have used it was when Hastings support events were divided up into groups of approx 16 by grade as it was then. Obviously, you do not know which group a player will be in until entries close.
Group therefore allowed you to enter all of the players into the one tournament and then sort and allocate to a section. The software then had this master file but also individual files for each section.

[James Toon]

Maybe my summary of the Group field was unclear. I meant that it could be used exactly as Alex described. You would take all the entries first, and then allocate every entrant to a named section. This would have the effect of creating a series of sub-files within the main tournament file.

[Paul McKeown]

Tania Karali's user guide explains two of these fields (Type and Group) in chapter 13. In researching the others I came across the official Swiss-Manager manual, which seems to have been last updated in 2014. http://swiss-manager.at/unload/swissmanagerhelp_eng.pdf.
All the fields are listed in the section "Input of Participants".

Graduate
This seems to be the same as "Title", e.g. GM, IM etc. No explanation is given for why both these fields are included.

Group
This user-defined field can be used in various ways but probably the most common is to define the sections within a tournament, e.g. Open, Major. This enables Chess-Results to display the separate sections as sub-groups of the same event within one overall event website.

Type
This is used to describe age categories. e.g. U12, U14 etc. This is useful if you want to include age-related prizes.

Source
This describes the rating list from which the player was entered. In this case it will be ENG.

Some of these will be populated automatically when you input data from a list.

More generally, if there's something you have to know about Swiss–Manager, and no-one here can help, you could ask the program creator, Heinz Herzog. His contact details are listed at https://chess-results.com/Kontakt.aspx?lan=1. His preferred languages are English and German.

[Paul McKeown]

Graduate
This seems to be the same as "Title", e.g. GM, IM etc. No explanation is given for why both these fields are included.

It is used to provide a player's academic qualification, such as "Dr.", "Prof.", "Ing,", etc.

Very Germanwelt.

If one was Hyacinth Bucket, one could alternatively use the field for "Bt.", "Hon.", "HRH", etc.

Otherwise, just use it as a free field to sort your players by as you may from time to time find necessary.

Type
This is used to describe age categories. e.g. U12, U14 etc. This is useful if you want to include age-related prizes.

Yes - this will be filled for you automatically if you import your players from Excel as a "Unicode" database. Just remember to set :

• Input > Set up Tournament > Age Groups - need a list , e,g, U9, U11, U14
• Input > Set up Tournament > Cutoff Date - need the date at which a player falls into one age category or another, e.g. yyyy/12/31 for calendar year or yyyy/08/31 for academic year

Otherwise use as another three character freeform field for sorting your players.

[John Upham]

Updated Swiss Manager to 14.0.0.80

Annoyingly, this update has reset the order of precedence of my imported rating lists to make the FIDE ones first and the ECF ones last.

Has this been reported as a bug? If not, I will.