Problem Summary - Pairing Logic Dialog

The Problem Summary dialog provides a statistical overview of pairing challenges encountered when making USCF pairings. Access this feature by clicking the “Problem summary” button in the pairing logic dialog.

Overview

The summary displays data in two columns:

• Natural pairings: Problems with the initial pairing attempt
• Actual pairings: Problems in the final pairings SwissSys produced

Problem Categories

The summary tracks the following types of pairing issues:

Illegal Pairings

If legal pairings were not possible, this shows the number of illegal pairings that occurred.

Group Skips

This tells you how many players were paired out of their score group as “oddmen”, and how many groups were skipped in making these pairings.

For example, a player paired down three score groups to avoid an illegal pairing or to deal with an oddman adds three to this total. Each out-of-score group pairing counts only once—SwissSys does not add that player’s opponent into the total.

Consecutive Colors

This is the number of instances of three consecutive colors, white or black.

When zip-code-restricted pairing or class pairing is in effect, this row is relabeled In-group priority violation — it then counts pairings that crossed the active in-group constraint rather than consecutive-color cases. The underlying value is the same row; only the caption changes.

Bad Equalizations

This is the number of players paired with bad equalization for color.

Bad Alternations

This is the number of players paired with bad alternation of color.

FIDE-Mode Rows

When FIDE rules are active, the summary grid expands from 6 rows to 10. In addition to the five problem categories above, four FIDE-specific float rows are shown:

A float occurs when a player is paired against an opponent from a different score group: the higher-scoring player floats down, the lower-scoring player floats up. FIDE rules discourage repeating a recent float in the same direction, so these rows let the Tournament Director see how often the pairings had to repeat a float against a player who had already floated the same way in one of the last two rounds. As with the other categories, the Natural column reflects the initial pairing attempt and the Actual column reflects the final pairings SwissSys produced.

Interpreting the Results

Taken together, this information gives the Tournament Director a clear understanding of how difficult the pairings were and how much SwissSys was able to improve them through optimization.

Related Topics

• Help — Access the SwissSys help system
• Technical Help and Contact Information — Get support for unresolved issues