Step 15 - Running Team Tournaments

There are three kinds of team tournaments which SwissSys supports: Individual team, Fixed-roster team, and Teams-only fixed-roster style.

These are among the different “event types” you can choose from when declaring your sections in the Tournament Setup dialog.

In many ways you can handle them in SwissSys just as you do a regular Swiss type section.

Among other things, you register the players on the team just as you do players for a regular Swiss, the only difference being the need to include a code for their team along with their other registration information.

Individual team tournaments in particular require very little explanation, because they are exactly like regular Swiss events with these exceptions:

1. Players on the same team don’t play against each other. (An exception here is if “Plus 2 pairings” are allowed. See the topic Rules for Pairing for more on this.)

2. The team code registration field becomes important. Use a short (up to eight letters) code as a mnemonic for the player’s team when entering them.

You can expand this team code to a full team name using the Team | Expanded team names option.

SwissSys keeps these expansions on file and loads them for you every time you start it up.

3. Team results are calculated based on the scores of the highest-ranking players from each team.

The number of players on a team that qualify for having their scores added in to the team total varies from tournament to tournament, and is set in SwissSys on the Team menu at any time before requesting team standings.

Furthermore, some reports and charts which are not relevant to a regular Swiss are useful for Individual team events.

These options (such as a pairing list by team) are to be found in the Team menu.

So much for Individual team tournaments.

Fixed-roster team events, on the other hand, are a very different kind of tournament, and SwissSys treats them accordingly. To begin with, only a small number of players is allowed to be on each team.

Four is the most common number, with usually one or two alternates allowed. (Note: SwissSys will automatically choose the correct number of players when making pairings but it is the TD’s responsibility to ensure that a team does not have too many players participating as alternates.) Secondly, each team plays as a unit against the members of another team.

The winner of the round (the “match point” winner) is the team with the most wins. “Game points” — that is, the margin of victory — is frequently used as a tiebreaker, but can also be used for determining pairings (see Pair teams by game points). By far the most important thing to keep in mind with fixed-roster events is that both team statistics and individual statistics are important, so you need to be able to toggle between them at any time.

In SwissSys you do this from the main view with the View|Team based views menu (the shortcut is Ctrl-T). This option is only available when you run a fixed-roster event.

In general, before taking any action on a player, consider whether what you are doing applies only to that single player or to the whole team. If it applies to the whole team, you will usually want to switch to team-based mode before doing it.

For instance, to switch team pairings, you could try to view the individual pair chart and laboriously change a lot of individual match-ups, but SwissSys will complain.

This is because it knows what you are up to and tells you to change to team-based mode first.

Or to give another example, think about byes. If you give an individual an advance bye, that just means that player is out for theround, even though the player’s team will still get paired.

If you want to give the whole team a bye, don’t give everyone on the team a bye.

That doesn’t change the team pairings at all. Instead, switch to team-based mode and give the whole team a bye from the Tinker dialog orfrom the Pairings Setup dialog when you make pairings.

Teams-only Fixed-roster events are a simplified version of fixed-roster events for those cases where you don’t need to keep track of individual results.

Typically you would enter team names and ratings instead of entering individual names and ratings at registration time.

The tournament is run exactly like an individual tournament except that when you enter wins and losses, SwissSys will prompt you for the margin of victory (game points).

The accumulated game points can then be used either as a tie-breaker or in place of the match points, just as in a regular fixed-roster tournament. To get hands-on practice with a fixed-roster event, load the tournament TeamDemo.tmt from the Events folder.

This is a fixed-roster event (four players per team) after two rounds.

After just a little experimentation, particularly with the alternation between team-based and normal views, you should get a feel for how to run a successful fixed-roster event.

Experiment with the various team menu options, especially the Team|Team roster/Standings menu pick, which shows you a combined team and individual standings chart. Of course, this information is intended only to give you an introduction to the topic.

For more information on fixed-roster events, look in the help file under Fixed-roster tournaments.

Or better still, run your own simulated tournaments.

For most of us, that’s the quickest path to confidence and mastery of any software. Final step: Step 16 - Setting up a database for player registration