Step 2 - Advance Registration
It is now 12:30 a.m., and you want to key in all the advance entries you have for your tournament before going to bed.
Go to the Registration dialog by pulling down the “Players” menu and selecting “Register”. (As with most of the important commands there are shortcuts you can also use. In this case, you could have pressed the F2 key or clicked on the pencil toolbar button.)
Rating Search Options
Before taking you to the registration dialog, SwissSys prompts you for some information about the ratings you want to use for this event.
This dialog sets the search options for player ratings if you load players from a database or an online site. For this practice tournament, just accept the defaults and click OK.
Registration Dialog
The registration dialog is in multiple parts. If you have a typical monitor, you can keep the “Wide view” option checked to see more information. For smaller screens, uncheck that option to condense the dialog.
On the left side is the registration tab, with lots of boxes, and you can fill in as many as you want or need. For now we can ignore most of these registration fields, concentrating on the most commonly-used ones. Once you see how these fields work it will be easy for you to fill in the others later on.
The right side has three tabs where you can search for players in a database, at an online site, or in a club list. More on these later.
Registering Your First Player
If the player name field on the left does not have a blinking cursor in it, click there now with the mouse to make it the active field.
Going down your imaginary advance registration list, type in the first player’s name, in last-name-first format.
Let’s say the first player is Paul Morphy who, having heard such wonderful things about you, has decided to come back from the dead just to play in your tournament.
So type “Morphy, Paul”. When you hit tab you are taken to the next field — the I.D. number. Type in any number for the former champ. When a player has no I.D. number you can just type something like “new” or leave it blank.
Hit tab twice to go to the rating field and type in a rating (try 2800 for this tournament). If at any time you make a mistake you can back up using Shift-Tab (or the arrow keys) to fix it.
For many tournaments, these are the only three fields that are essential. (In fact, only the name field is strictly required.) If you leave the rating blank the player is assumed to be unrated, and all other fields will be initially blank.
Later on you can read in the documentation about how to use the other fields.
For now, go ahead and register Paul Morphy by clicking on the “Accept” button or by hitting Ctrl-Enter. (This means holding down the Control key and hitting Enter at the same time.) When you do, his name appears in the player roster next to the registration window.
As you enter more players, they will be kept sorted alphabetically and ranked by their rating.
Using Club Lists for Faster Registration
In a real tournament you could continue in this way registering all your players who had the good sense to register in advance. Then, when you were all done, you’d click the “Exit” button to return to the Main Menu.
You may be wondering, though, if there is a way to save on typing. There is, by using one of several shortcuts SwissSys supports. Let’s begin with the “Club List” importation shortcut.
A Club List is a list of players with registration details. If you have players that frequently play in your tournaments you can keep all their registration information in a club list for easy retrieval, as demonstrated below with the practice club list called “Club.Txt”. This file is in your SwissSys folder.
Note: Rather than a club list, most people will use an official database or online site as the main source of their player information.
They get these databases from some parent organization, such as the USCF.
We will start with clubs in this tutorial because they are a little simpler to work with and because there is one ready-to-go with your SwissSys installation, but the principles are the same.
To access a club list, click on the “Search club” tab on the right of the registration dialog. This should load the default club list, “club.txt” into the box below.
You may later want to change the default club to one of your own making. That is easy to do, but let’s not worry about it now.
In the player name field, type part of a player’s name, “Smith, J” (with a space, but without a period). As you type, you zero in on the name in the club list window. Click the “Load” button, or simply double click on the name in the list.
This automatically returns you to the registration tab, where you can inspect the loaded information and make any necessary changes or additions.
Many of the player fields should be filled in automatically. The only information that may require some updating is the rating field. Click the “Accept” button again to register the player.
Do another club list import by returning to the Search club tab and scrolling to another player’s name, “Johnson, M”. Load their information the same way.
You can edit the rating if needed. Click on the rating field (or just tab to it), and change it to 1450, then click “Accept”.
Shortcut Registration Method
At this point, note that if you try to register Paul Morphy again you can’t without altering the name; no identical names are allowed.
Let’s register another player, this time using a short-cut method.
From the registration menu, select Import|Default data source, and change it to “Club list” by selecting that menu option.
Now, whenever you are typing a name or player I.D. in the registration tab and click Enter, the club list will be automatically searched for a match.
If one exists, it will be loaded, so you never leave the registration tab at all.
If multiple matches are found, you will again be taken to the Search club tab to narrow your search.
Try that approach by typing the name Carlsen, Magnus, in the name field of the registration tab. If all goes well, the champ’s data should be plugged into the registration fields without further ado.
Go ahead and register the following five players using the club list in either of these ways. You should then have a total of nine registered.
If you have an Internet connection, you could also try your hand at loading their information from the Search online tab, which works much the same way.
Players to Register
- Kasparov, Garry
- Kramnik, Vladimir
- Anand, Viswanathan
- Seirawan, Yasser
- Skovron, James
By now it’s 1:35 a.m. and you are out of donuts, so click the registration dialog’s “Exit” button to return to the main menu.
The autosave feature will save your work if you still have the feature enabled.
Advance Registration Complete
You are now done with advance registration. In the morning, you will go through the same registration process as described above for all the last-minute registrations.