This adventure with daytime Swiss Teams had a few problems, so let me address those
issues before presenting the results.
First, there is the question of the best format for this event. I strongly prefer to
run a strati-flighted event to provide more competitive matches for everyone. With the
large differences in skill and experience between the experts in Flight A and the novices
in Flight C, matches between disparate teams are not very competitive or fun for either
team. This event can be run as a single stratified section, and I likely should have made
that choice this time. But if I do so, I would wish to avoid first round pairings of A
teams against C teams, not only because these matches would not be very competitive, but
the luck of the draw can give some A teams a large advantage over others. A team that
draws one of the weakest C teams is likely to score an easy first round blitz and an unfair
lead over other A teams who drew more competitive opponents. My plan to avoid this the
next time we run a single session stratified Swiss is to modify the random draw of first
round opponents, so that each A team will draw a B team, the remaining B teams will play
each other and C teams will start the first round against each other. This does not
prevent some large mismatches in the second and subsequent rounds when the computer takes
over the pairings, but it does provide a more equitable start.
With enough A/X teams, we avoid these problems by having separate events for A/X and
B/C. I had thought I was going to have five A/X teams for Friday's game, and I have an
excellent 4-round round-robin for that case. I had even prepared pre-dealt hands and
could have provided hand records if we had had five teams in A/X. With six or more teams,
one can run a normal Swiss although there are some pairing pitfalls to avoid in the 6-team,
7-team, and 9-team movements. I apparently erred in thinking that we could still have a
separate 4-team A/X by playing a 3-round round-robin with 9-board matches. This fell prey
to at least two difficulties. Playing 9-board matches in the same room with other teams
playing only 7-board matches makes for logistical and noise issues. And with only four
teams in an event, the ACBL awards only one overall place. (With five teams, there would
have been two.) So, I made a poor choice, and was roundly criticezed for doing so.
Second, I faced a very difficult decision at game time. We had 13 3/4 tables for Flight
B/C, and if I send the unpaired three people home, I not only make them unhappy, but I also
have an odd number of teams in the event, and will have to run 3-way matches. I bravely (or
more likely, foolishly) chose to be a playing director to fill out the 14th team. This did
not work well, as there are several computer tasks that had to be left partially done (such
as entering player names for the walk-in teams), and my attention was distracted enough that
I made a data entry error with the first round results that propagated to later rounds and
led to confusion about the actual scores for three teams. Moral: I am not Superman and
should never again try being a playing director in a Swiss game. The solution is to have
a stand-by player who lives nearby and could come in at the last minute to fill out the
movement. I would be glad to hear from volunteers for that role!
I ended up discarding the gamefile created at Friday's game, and remaking another file,
entering the match results from the data which I had or could deduce. The result is clean
results files for both flights. In the process, ACBLscore finally agreed to tell me what
the MP awards were for Flight A/X. (Why it would not earlier remains a mystery.)
Congratulations to the Tsypkin team (Anton, Sheila, Lloyd, and Pat) for winning Flight A
by a substantial margin. They won all three of their matches and collected 4.67 MP for
their efforts. The listing below shows IMP margins and VP for each match.
CLICK HERE FOR FLIGHT B/C
Junior Fund Swiss Teams Flight A/X Round-robin, Friday Morn Session August 1, 2008
Scores after 3 rounds
Team Wins Score O/All Rank MPs
A X
1 3.00 49.00 A 1 4.67(OA) Anton Tsypkin - Sheila Gabay - Lloyd Arvedon - Pat McDevitt
4 2.00 30.00 A 0.68(SA) Melvin Marcus - Myra Kolton - William Hunter - Shome Mukherjee
3 1.00 23.00 A 0.34(SA) Marina Polestra - Sandra Nyman - H Patricia Hanna - Saundra Gotch
2 0.00 18.00 X Stuart Whittle - Bruce Greenspan - Saul Agranoff - Joyce Pearson
Junior Fund Swiss Teams Flight A/X Round-robin (9-board matches)
**ROUND**
TEAM # 1 2 3
\/
1> v2 19 v3 26 v4 15
16 18 15
2> v1 -19 v4 -6 v3 -6
4 7 7
3> v4 -4 v1 -26 v2 6
8 2 13
4> v3 4 v2 6 v1 -15
12 13 5