The Ladder Dialog

A ladder is a tournament in which players attempt to climb rungs by challenging and defeating players above them. **Before you can use the ladder dialog, you need to register players for your tournament in the usual way.

Then you can access this dialog either by clicking the Pairings | View ladder menu command, orby clicking Pairings | Pair next round****.

Use the firs approach if you just want to inspect the ladder or manage it manually; use the second approach when you want to set pairings and enter results “for the record”.

Which approach you use depends on whether or not you want to maintain a complete wallchart history and possibly submit games for ratings.

If you want to set pairings that will be recorded in the wall chart, always click “Pair next round”.

If you don’t care abou that, you can use the “View ladder” approach along with the “Enter results for listing purposes only” button described below. “Most of the information about this dialog that follows applies to either approach. In the box at left of this dialog is the current state of the ladder.

To begin with, players will be seeded as you have requested in the Ladder Rules dialog.

The default is to seed them by rating. **

player and click the “Pair” button to insert that player in the grid.

You can have SwissSys suggest the best color for any matchup based on the two players’ color histories, or you leave it the way you entered it.

Auto-pair all” button. **When done setting pairings, click “Done” to bring up the pairings dialog where you can enter results for that round as you would for any other tournament. (If you came to this dialog via the “View ladder” menu command, the “Done” button will be just a simple “OK” button to let you know that no pairings for the record will actually be performed when you exit.) **

Player positions, both after and before the latest round, are shown after the player’s name in the ladder list. **If you do not want to enter games as an official round that will be listed in the wall chart, you can get to this dialog by selecting Pairings | View ladder.

Set up pairings as described above, but this time click on the button labeled **“Enter results for listing purposes only”.

SwissSys then prompts you for game-by-game results and adjusts player positions in the ladder without otherwise recording the results. **

“Promote/demote” button.

You can also enter a player as a bye player, which is mainly useful if you have a strict policy of punishing no-shows, and don’t want to punish a player who was forced to take abye for lack of a challenge.