16. Swiss room, for keeping the players in the same room

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In some Swiss events the distance between rooms can be substantial. There are settings that allows you to keep pairs within their room, one for the first two random rounds, and other for the remaining rounds.

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First two rounds

To simplify the movement between random rounds 1 and 2 there is a setting that allows you to keep the pairs in the rooms where they started. Otherwise you would have pairs having to walk from one room to the other.

When closing the preparations, select the Swiss movement with 2 random rounds and click Advanced. Select the Swiss tab. Here you find the Room parameter. Assume that you have 82 tables divided between three rooms:

  • Room 1: 1-35
  • Room 2: 36-59
  • Room 3: 60-82

Under normal circumstances all EW pairs move to the next higher table number. From table 82, EW moves to table 1. What we really want to achieve is the following:

  • 35EW -> 1EW
  • 59EW -> 36EW
  • 82EW -> 60EW

You do this by entering the starting table numbers in each room, i.e.

  • 36,60

in the above example. This means that the rooms start at table 36 and at table 60. The first room always starts at 1, so you do not have to enter that.

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Later rounds

As a parallel to the room parameter, where you can close preparations for a Swiss event, and have the pairs move within the same room for the second round, there is now a room+round feature that allows you to do the same for subsequent rounds.

Go to Contest menu > Settings > General and the Swiss (more) tab. Here you can enter the same room information as in Close preparations above. On top of that you can enter rounds where normal Swiss will apply, thereby leading to the other rounds being treated on a room-by-room basis.

Let us assume you enter the following:

  • 3,6,9

This means that when the seating is created for rounds 3, 6 and 9, the positions are assigned just as in a normal Swiss. No consideration is taken to the room assignments.

For the other rounds (4, 5, 7, 8, 10, and so on), the positions are assigned so that the pairs will remain in the same room. This means that the overall ranking is taken into account, but this ranking is filtered on a room-by-room basis to determine what room certain pairs are seated in.

This could lead to minor unfairness here and there, but in case the rooms are far apart, this is compensated by substantially happier players and organisers. As long as the rooms are “large enough” and the merging rounds (the round numbers you enter above) are reasonably close to each other, nobody will complain about being in the wrong room for a round or two.

I encourage you to a) use 2 random rounds, and b) specify at least round 3 in the round parameter. This means that the first 2 rounds are fixed according to the basic movement. Round 3 will be according to the results in the first round, with a complete movement of the field, maybe the same in round 4 to increase fairness, and then keep the pairs in the rooms for a few rounds. This line of reasoning would lead to the following entry:

  • 3,4,7,…

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