Monday, September 27, 2010

Swiss Pairings Committee

I sat at the back of the FIDE Swiss Pairings Committee as an interested observer. The meeting was pretty quick but there were two significant decisions that came out of it.
The first was a change of wording to correct an error in the Dutch Pairing Rules. Section C.6 is now changed (in part) to read "If now p pairings are obtained in compliance with B1 through to B6 the pairing of this score bracket is considered complete".
This is an important change (in Australia at least), as Arbiters who insisted that pairings should always be top half v bottom half in a score bracket would point to the previous wording to justify their case. Of course this was just an error in the wording, as committee chairman Christian Krause stated at the outset.
The second change was to do with the selection of a player receiving a bye (if necessary). Instead of the bye going to the lowest ranked player (who hasn't already recieved one), the bye will now go to the lowest ranked player who 'equalises' the colours in the bottom score group. What this means that if there is a choice of players in the lowest score group who could receive a bye, choose the lowest player that results in the most number of remaining players being paired with their correct colours.
Apparently Swiss Master already does this, but it is unclear which other programs do it as of now.
There was a long discussion by by Eduard Dubov concerning both his own pairing system, and his proposal for a new system for the Olympiad, and both of these were held over for future testing and discussion.

3 comments:

Garvin said...

Shaun, do you mind if I re-post this on chesschat?

Shaun Press said...

Knock yourself out (attribution required of course)

chris said...

Is there someplace where these changes are regularly made available? The change to C.6 is still not reflected in the official document on FIDE's website, as of 7/17/2011. Unfortunately, this has lead to some confusion has I try to implement these rules, as it wasn't clear where the relative criteria were to be applied. I am doing my best to adhere as strictly as possible to the rules, but they occasionally seem ambiguous.