Step 14 - Multi-section Tournaments

Now you are ready to try a slightly more complicated example involving more than one section at a time.

Section Panels

The easiest way to keep track of multiple sections is to use the section panels which SwissSys automatically creates for you when you use the Tournament Setup dialog.

The steps below show you some of the highlights.

As usual with SwissSys there is more than one way to skin a cat, so as you explore the program you may discover other ways of doing things that suit your style better.

Let’s open up a two-section tournament. Our sections will be called Invitational and Booster.

Both these sections are already set up for you as sample files through three rounds.

This saves you the step of having to register all the players and key in the results. In your SwissSys “Demo” folder, open the file Demo1.json.

Two section panels should appear, labeled “Invitational” and “Booster”.

A colored panel means this section is the active one. Click on “Invitational” to activate it.

Notice that these sections have also been added to the Section Box in the upper right of the main window. Selecting a section from this list is another way to activate it.

Suppose you want to register a new player in a section. You can either click on the appropriate section panel and then go to the registration dialog, or you can go straight to the registration dialog and select the appropriate section for this player from there.

Since usually you are registering players for all your sections at the same time, this second method is usually the most convenient, so let’s do that now. Click on the pencil toolbar button to go to the registration dialog. Enter “Karpov, Anatoly”, any old ID, and a rating of 2690.

In the section box just above the name, select the section he wants to enroll in (“booster”), and click on “Accept”.

You get a warning that the rating is out of bounds for this section (this is one of the options you can set in the section setup dialog.) Ignore the warning, then click “Exit” to return to the main view.

Note that the section you chose is now the currently highlighted section.

You can tell SwissSys to register players automatically in a given section based on their ratings. This “Ratings registration rule” is one of the environment options you can set. Now let’s say Karpov changes his mind and decides to play in the Invitational section after all. Click on the player roster button if the roster is not already showing.

Find his name, and click and drag it to the section panel that corresponds to the invitational section. Confirm this as a “move” (not a “duplication” in this case) when prompted.

All the operations you perform on a tournament deal with the current, highlighted section.

You could proceed from here to pair one section, click a different section panel to do its pairings, go to a third section, and so on.

All the usual SwissSys commands will apply to whichever section you have activated.

Many common operations like print-outs can be done in a batch. If you have more than one section declared, SwissSys will give you that option where appropriate.

Otherwise, running a multi-section tournament is no much different from running a single-section tournament.

You just need to activate whichever section you are interested in by clicking on its section panel or selecting it from the section box. This is a basic introduction to running bigger tournaments with SwissSys.

For more details about multi-section tournaments, see Multi-Section Tournament Setup, Section Box, and Section Panels. Next step: Step 15 - Running Team Tournaments