Fixed-Roster Tournaments - Overview

Although the standard fixed-roster tournament works very much like regular Swiss type tournaments on the surface, underneath they are different animals. For this reason, SwissSys gives you the option of viewing the information for a fixed-roster tournament as “team-based” or “player-based”.

If you don’t need to keep track of individual results, use Teams-only fixed roster as your event type.

This cuts way down on your workload. To begin with, you must tell SwissSys how many players can be paired on a team.

Do this from the Team | Number on team or subtotal menu. For a team-based view of the data, check the View | Team-based views menu (short-cut is Ctrl-T).

To view it by player again, uncheck it.

Choosing your approach

If you want to deal with results and other tournament data from the large perspective, view the data by team and enter results that way.

If you need to know information about a particular player or game, view it by player.

SwissSys will do its best to reconcile the two approaches, but it may need your help. For instance, if you enter match results by team, SwissSys has no way of knowing the game-by-game results. It will arbitrarily assign wins to the various individuals on a team to reflect the match result. This may or may not be what really happened.

As long as you are looking at things from the team perspective that doesn’t matter much, but if you submit games for ratings, or publish a final list showing individual performance, you will need to get more specific. After the tournament you can only do this by editing each player’s results in the main view, so if you can, enter team results on a player-by-player basis. When you choose to enter results by player rather than by team, SwissSys will calculate which team won automatically, and provide the game points won value for tiebreaks.

In short, choose whichever approach fits your needs best, but understand what you may be gaining and losing by doing so.

For another look at this issue see the topic Team Results or Individual Results?

Board switching, alternates and forfeits

Some other points to note about fixed-rosters concern switching, alternates and forfeits:

If you allow board switching there are several ways you can go. One is just to display the pair chart by player and switch the pairings manually. This same technique can be used to force SwissSys to accept a team’s alternate players for pairing. Since SwissSys can display all players in the pair chart (not just those assigned a game) switching in this way is easy. See Pair Chart Formatting to learn how to display these zero-point bye recipients.

A second, more automated way to switch board order (and move up alternates) is to set the board order for the players. Do this either at registration time (board order is a registration entry field), from the Tinker dialog (after registration is done) or, most easily, from the Set fixed-roster board order dialog (on the Team menu).

For more details on board order, see the topic Set fixed-roster board order

You can also force SwissSys to pair alternates by simply doing a temporary withdrawal of the players who are sitting out a round.

SwissSys will then fill in their slots with the highest rated alternate players automatically. You can re-enter the players for the next round if need be.

If a team does not have enough players to put a player on each board, then the bottom boards will forfeit. These forfeits are handled automatically.