Step 1 - Setting Up the Tournament

Here is the scene: It is midnight, the night before your first big tournament — The Patzer Open — and you are at home setting up the computer in the hopes of getting as much work done ahead of time as possible.

You have SwissSys and a box of donuts nearby to help you in this task.

First, if it isn’t loaded already, get SwissSys up and running by clicking on the icon in your programs menu or desktop. If you already have SwissSys running, bring up the Task Launcher by selecting Setup|Task Launcher.

When you run SwissSys, the first thing that pops up is the Task Launcher, which guides you through the most common start-up operations.

Among the tasks you can choose from here are setting up a new tournament or opening an old one. Click on the New button, which takes you to the Tournament Setup dialog.

The Tournament Setup Dialog

The Tournament Setup dialog is made up of two main parts, a top half devoted to tournament information and a bottom half that lists the sections.

Let’s start at the top, with the box marked “tournament title for printing”.

If you wanted, you could type in the title of your tournament (Patzer Open). It’s a good idea to give your tournaments useful titles, but often the filename you provide when you save the tournament can take the place of the tournament title.

Since that is what we will do here in just a minute, we can skip this, along with the other tournament fields. These other fields are handy to have for later, when it comes time to create rating reports and website uploads, but we won’t need them for this demonstration.

Next you need to enter details on each section your tournament contains.

For this first tutorial exercise we are only going to work with one section. Later on you can try some more complicated examples.

Click on the button marked “Add a section” to bring up the section setup dialog.

In the box marked “section name” enter the name of your one and only section (let’s call it “Patzers”).

The boxes below are where you will enter specifics about this section that SwissSys needs to know. For now, don’t worry about all the details, since the most common (default) values are provided for you, and those are the ones we are mostly going to use here.

There are a couple of things we might as well add, though. In the box marked “section title” type “Master Patzers”, and in the time controls box, type “Game in 67 minutes”. These will appear in printouts.

Finish your setup of this section and return to the main tournament setup dialog by clicking on the “OK” button. This adds the section you just created to your list of sections in the box.

If you want to inspect or change the setup for this section you can click on the button marked “View/edit section”.

You now have a tournament of one section ready for advance player registration. Click on the Done button to go to the main SwissSys screen.

You will see a highlighted “section panel” under the toolbar representing this section. If you had multiple sections, you would toggle between them by clicking on the desired panel.

Save Your Work

Now is a good time to save your work, so select File|Save, or click on the standard Save icon in the upper left of the toolbar.

You can store your tournaments anywhere you like, but in the interest of good organization you are better off using the SwissSys “Events” folder. (Typical path: Documents/SwissSys/Events).

Name the file “Patzer Open” (the extension of .json is automatically added) and click Save.

Then help yourself to another donut.

Next step: Step 2 - Advance Registration