Tournament Setup and Tools - Setup Menu

The Tournament Setup dialog is where you declare what sections are in your tournament and do some important setup of each of those sections.

If you want to change setup information for only your current section, see Current section setup.

Starting a New Tournament

If you are starting a new tournament from scratch, you can give a title for the tournament (e.g. “2002 Patzer Open”) and list some time controls. These are optional, and are used in captions for various printouts.

Often, in fact, you can simply leave the tournament title blank, in which case the file name you give to the tournament when you save it will be used instead.

Adding Sections

Then click on the “Add section” button to declare the first section. This brings up the section setup dialog, where you give some details about this section.

Complete this form with the information that applies to this section.

Information you provide includes the following:

Section title - This is a supplement to the tournament title above.

Include any information you care to add to the tournament title that is specific to this section.

Again, the section name often makes including a section title unnecessary or redundant.

Event type - Regular Swiss is the default, but you can also choose Individual team, Fixed-Roster team, or Round Robin, Teams-only fixed roster, or Ladder.

For more details, see the topic tournament types.

Style - Choose either Regular or Dbl, which stands for Double-Blitz Style, in which players play two games, one as white and one as black.

Coin toss - Tell SwissSys who won the coin toss for first round colors.

Use ”-” to let SwissSys pick the winner at random.

Rating type - This tells SwissSys whether to use regular, quick, or blitz ratings when importing from or exporting to a database.

Time controls - Another supplemental caption field for printouts.

Use this field if this section runs at a different time control from the other sections.

Rating range - The two fields included under this label give a rating range for the section.

If you later attempt to register someone outside the range you will receive a warning.

Starting board number - For reasonable seating, each section should have its own starting board number that begins safely past the previous section’s last board number.

Although the value of the last board number varies and is not saved in any case, it is easy to estimate by taking the first board number and adding half the total number of players in the section (plus another 10 or so to allow for late entries).

Final round - The default is ”-” which means unspecified.

You would need to change this only if you have enabled any of the pairing rules that depend on knowing the final round or if you only want to display tiebreaks or prizes at the end of the tournament.

Exclude from USCF rating report - This file will not be included in the default list of sections when you are ready to create a rating report for the USCF.

Exclude from batch operations - Any section that has this option checked will be skipped when performing such batch operations as pairing all sections at once or printing charts for all sections at once.

This is handy if you have, for instance, a section of side games that you do not want to include in such batch operations.

Important Notes

The option to exclude this section’s games from FIDE reports after merging has been moved from its former location here. This is now handled in the merge dialog itself.

Note that the event type and style cannot be changed after first round pairings are made, with one exception: If you are running an individual/team type tournament you can “fool” SwissSys into thinking it is a regular Swiss type by turning off all pairing restrictions (in the Pairing Rules dialog). When you make first round pairings, SwissSys will ask you to confirm all the above information.

Completing Section Setup

When you have set the various section items properly, click “Done” to return to the previous dialog. The new section has been added to your list.

Continue this setup process for all your sections. If you change your mind or make a mistake with a section, you can edit the setup values or delete the section with the buttons labeled accordingly.

Section Order

Section panels will be created for your sections in the order in which you enter them. You can adjust the order of these sections using the arrow keys marked “Move section up/down”.

Select the section you want to move, then click the arrow key to reorder it.

If you want to learn how to set up sections for a quad tournament automatically, see Quad tournaments.