(For the subset of you readers who are currently active in quiz-bowl.)
Out of idle curiosity, how many specific people do you know of who could plausibly (and would be willing to) run a large field (let's say order of 64, feel free to hedge your answer if 32 vs. 64 vs. 128 changes the field) Swiss pair style tournament without nontrivial delays between rounds?
I claim that the set of qualified candidates includes Jim Puls, Lyric Doshi, and myself*. Maybe Chris Sewell if he were willing. Who else?
*- To the extent that the 2004 and 2005 HSNCT pairings went up timely. In each case it took longer than I'd liked but apparently still much less time than typical Swiss pair contexts (mainly debate from what I understand).
Other people with significant tournament control room experience categorically reject (very wisely!) any desire or ability to do large-scale Swiss pairs themselves. It's a LOT of work and stress to do right, something I wouldn't wish on my worst enemy (even though for my own part I secretly relish it).
With the right software tools (must be sufficiently user-friendly among other things) that list could expand. I think everyone I mentioned by name above has a system he himself could use effectively but probably isn't quite robust enough for just any old TD to plug in.
Posted by Matt Bruce at April 11, 2006 12:48 PMPretty much anyone with experience as a USCF chess tournament director should be able to do Swiss pairings rapidly, or at least that used to be the case. By this point, I'm sure there must be a basic software package out there to run the algorithm given the number of chess tournaments that use it.
Posted by: Tom Galloway at April 11, 2006 05:11 PMI see two reasons why "plug in a USCF TD and the usual software" isn't as easy as it looks:
1. Quiz games take about half an hour and end at almost exactly the same time, leading to a data entry crunch. (I haven't been to a chess tournament in awhile but I presume G/15 or less still isn't live Swiss-paired.)
2. (Much more minor.) We can't use *exactly* the USCF algorithm (flight of 2N players: 1 vs. N+1, 2 vs. N+2, etc.) because that would penalize some teams for having higher points per tossup heard. Not too difficult to fix but does mean that an out-of-the-box software solution wouldn't do.
Posted by: me at April 11, 2006 07:51 PM