English Chess Forum

FIDE provides code for programs, without having to code it themselves. This way it will always score 100% on reproducability, by definition. Why go to the effort of coding it yourself? JaVaFo is the modern reference implementation, but it cannot be used directly from browser-based JavaScript, so I ...

In all my programs, the pairings for each round can be saved, making tournament reproduction straightforward. From any round, the next round can be regenerated and should exactly reproduce the previously published pairings. Do pairing programs such as Swiss-Manager not provide this capability? That...

Of course reproducibility does not by itself make it best; reproducibility is a bar it needs to clear before we can talk about all those other nice attributes like fairness and information content. A system that is 90% fair but isn't reproducible, is further from "ideal"; a system that's 80% fair a...

Where exactly do you play that withdrawals from all-play-alls are common? Yesterday, Christer Nilsson, in the Swedish Chess Federation Facebook group, complained: "Round-robin groups that run over a six-month period have a major drawback. They risk generating a large number of unnecessary byes and ...

This free program is exactly what tournament directors have long been looking for. It can manage up to four independent round-robin tournaments, each with 3 to 16 players, and also supports double round robins. The Sonneborn-Berger system, the FIDE standard tie-break, is used by default. Each of the...

Why is the Indian player underrated? Isn't Elo supposed to be a global system that provides an accurate estimate of playing strength regardless of where a player lives? If what you say is true, then Elo has failed in its most fundamental purpose. Perhaps we would be better off returning to national...

FIDE rejects randomization on the grounds that only a deterministic, reproducible pairing system with objective rating-based seeding can provide an impartial and reliable evaluation of player performance for norm and title purposes. I think you'll find that FIDE requires a deterministic, reproducib...

FIDE's regulations state that a FIDE-rated Swiss tournament should use one of the official FIDE Swiss systems (Dutch, Burstein, etc.), unless another system has received specific authorization. As they say in the corridors of power in FIDE: nyet If you wanted to submit a club night for rating, wher...

The RBT system addresses this problem by seeking pairings that maximize rating information. Players are paired against opponents whose ratings are close enough for the result to be statistically meaningful. Consequently, tournament performance becomes a more accurate measure of playing strength. Ho...

I have solved the withdrawal problem by allowing the administrator to convert the tournament to a Swiss system. This eliminates the issue of excessive byes. A tournament can also be configured to switch to Swiss after a specified number of RBT rounds. The Rating-Budget Tournament (RBT) system is now...

That's going to end in tears. Suppose after 5 rounds of a 7-round RBT, you have the following: 1 Average Annie 1600 (5/5) seeks White 2 Freddie the Favourite 2300 (4½/5) seeks Black 3 Dangerous Dave 2250 (4/5) seeks White ... 30 Freddie the Favourite's Teammate 1750 (0/5) Freddie the Favourite is u...

one could argue that RBT is fairer still than Dubov: it aims to ensure that players will face opponents of comparable strength relative to their own ratings . One could also argue that it's less fair because it penalises strong players for being strong players. Withdrawals are rarely an issue in ra...

[...] You keep insisting that Swiss is superior and must not be challenged. But the Swiss systems recognized by FIDE have weaknesses and are not fair in every respect. FIDE acknowledge that the Swiss pairing rules can be optimised even further , at the cost of a certain amount of transparency and s...

RBT is not intended to replace the Swiss system, but to offer an alternative—particularly for amateur, blitz, and rapid tournaments. For this reason, the strong negative reactions to it seem rather puzzling. What's wrong with a fair pairing system that sets the rounds in advance and makes for a mor...

I don't think you've quite understood your own invention on a deep enough level to be able to process what people are feeding back to you about it. There is a vast amount of academic literature on pairing systems. Here is a representative paper from fairly recently. Not only have we compared the Sw...