So this scenario is possible and indeed does happen from my understanding. A person can get an IA title by being chief or deputy arbiter at four international tournaments, without having to pass an exam or be tested on anything. I understood that IAs had to pass an exam including questions on pairing rules. These considerations do not apply to half-point byes and ideally they should not be treated as floats at all. Normally a bye is treated as a downfloat, the reasons for this being (a) that it is like being paired with an extremely weak player (b) that having gained a point without playing, a player does not deserve a downfloat in the next two rounds.
It is important to consider how your pairing software treats half-point byes in making such a decision. The Swiss system only takes notice of floats from the previous two rounds so half-point byes taken up to round seven should have been irrelevant for the whole field by round ten. We have already discussed that concept in the past where some posters seemed to think that a set of pairings could look right and thus be acceptable even though demonstrably in breach of the Dutch pairing rules.Ĭan't see why this would be an issue since irrespective of whether half-point byes are treated as floats or not, the last half-point byes were taken in round seven. I'm not sure, though I have an inkling, what might constitute an "acceptable" pairing as distinct from a "correct" one.
If the Dutch Swiss Rules were used, there is supposed to be only one correct set of pairings for a round and the pairing program should produce it. I was interested in your comment "not producing correct or acceptable pairings ". If they were using Swiss Perfect, there are known problems with floats in later rounds whether there are half point byes or not.
I'd like to hear about this from a general interest viewpoint. Would one of the arbiters care to tell everyone what the problem was and how we avoid these problems in future.įrom what I know at the moment I am tempted to recommend that we do not allow half point byes in serious FIDE rated swiss touraments such as Doeberl Cup or Sydney International. Therefore, if there was a delay, I think it was more likely to be caused by colours, rather than by float status.Īnyways, on a related point, even if the delay was caused by float status, I think the same issues of floats could come about by upfloats and downfloats, unless the claim is that the program is faulty, which I believe is a known issue in swiss perfect. If the tournament was 4/4 or 5/5, it does give the arbiters a bit more 'wiggle room'. So, the arbiters would need to meet colour preferences for each player in a score group, with each player having a strong colour preference, instead of having almost the whole field having a 4/4 or 5/5 colour preference. There would be a couple of players of course who would be on an absolute colour preference if they had 5/3 or 3/5, but this is also ignored for players over 50 per cent in terms of +3/-3 colours. The only players who would have had 4/4 would have been those who had taken one half point bye. With it being a ten round tournament, most players would have been on a 5/4 or 4/5 colour split, meaning in the final round almost the whole field would have had strong colour preferences. What could (most likely would) have made a difference for final round pairings is colours. I am not sure how much of a difference half point byes would have made to the final round pairings in terms of the float rules for those players over 50 per cent as floats aren't considered for players over 50 per cent. I can not comment specifically regarding Queenstown as I was neither there or have any personal knowledge of the situation of the situation(s) Brian describes.Īs a general point though, I will make a couple of comments.
I understand that the delays were related to the pairing programs not producing correct or acceptable pairings and this was caused by the treatment of floats with half point byes. There were some delays with the pairings in Round 10 at Queenstown.