Step 6 - Make Pairings

It’s now 9:53 a.m. and players, in anticipation of the start of the tournament, are beginning to circle you like hyenas. Time now to make the first round pairings. Pull down the Pairings menu and select “Pair Next Round” (shortcuts are the shiny pear icon on the toolbar or hitting the F5 key).

Section Setup Confirmation

This brings up first the section setup again for confirmation prior to first round pairings. We are going to be doing a pretty straightforward Swiss type section, so you can accept these defaults, but you won’t always do that.

For instance, if you were running a team tournament, or wanted to start seating for this section with a different board number, you could do that here.

If you are unsure of what any of these settings do, just let the mouse hover over the box in question and up will pop a helpful hint in a bubble. Click OK to confirm these settings.

Since most players resent traveling a long way just to find themselves paired up against their neighbors, SwissSys may ask you if you want to avoid pairing players from the same club against each other in round 1. (The club fields were filled in for you during registration when you loaded players from the club list.) Just say “No” or “No to all” here.

The next dialog you see is the Pairings Setup dialog, from which you have the option of forcing any pairings, byes, and board numbers you want to do manually before letting SwissSys take over. For now just accept whatever pairings SwissSys decides upon by clicking the OK to Pair button.

Automatic Backups

At crucial states in the tournament, such as when you make pairings, SwissSys saves a backup file for you automatically. If you ever need to access a backup file, you will find them (with names coded by the round number) in the Backups subfolder of the main tournament folder.

Inspect the Pairings

The pairings you made appear automatically when they are done. (They will also appear to the right of the main view, but that simpler listing is just for inspection and does not allow editing or entering results.) Take a look at the pairings now.

They should look reasonable.

With nine players you should have a bye player at the bottom (if you paired using USCF rules this would be the lowest rated player you have — presumably my brother) and the others should be paired according to Swiss system rules.

If you have any doubts, check the wall chart again to make sure the ratings correspond to the ones you intended. Click OK to return to the main menu.

Next step: Step 7 - Late Registration