If an event is billed as an individual tournament I don't think account should be taken of whether any of the participants form a "squad". At best you might offer entrants an option not to be paired against certain players, but this should be offered to all. That does explain why, one year at Hastings, with a newly acquired international rating, I was paired for the first eight rounds against unrated players, even though around half the players, mostly the top half, had ratings. I'd always suspected pairing manipulation so as to get rated v unrated and might have benefited myself on the way to a rating, but it seems there was an adult v Junior Squad bias as well.John McKenna wrote: Just one caveat though - in another thread it has come to light that pairings in some events, held during school holidays, in the British Isles may have been 'tweeked' to accommodate groups of juniors who, it was decided, would benefit from not being paired together if possible! Fair/unfair?
By contrast, in these International Junior events, the players are representing their Federations and measures to reduce the incidence of squad v squad would seem desirable, unlikely as it might be that FIDE would ever be minded to adopt them.