Final preparations
First, thanking the “sponsors”
Allen, for offering a $5 McDonald’s gift card to anyone who finishes with either perfect or 0 score.
Tacticus has offered to post games from the tournament using his software in development (it’s actually rather impressive) chessflash.com. We’ll be able to upload PGN files–there’s more stuff on his page about it.
Tournament Format
The first tournament was a 9-week marathon. As a few people mentioned (and I agree), it was simply too long. This time, I want to cap it to six weeks at most.
A few ideas were to do two smaller round robins, a Swiss, or just truncate a full round robin schedule. I kinda like the first, but it may not work well with an odd number of players since people will be playing different numbers of games. Your thoughts are welcome.
I don’t know how may players you have, but 2 round robins with the winners of each section having a playoff might be a good idea. Round robins are easier to run since you set up the sections, put the grid up, and let people play.
The problem with a swiss is you have to all the results in before pairing the next round. As we saw in the last LEPers tournament that would not have worked since some of us couldn’t play our opponent on the specific week scheduled. Also a swiss is more work for you because you have to do pairings each week.
Reply to PollyThat was a great point about accounting for real life, so that pretty quickly swung the pendulum into the two division scheme (away from Swiss).
Then, your appeal to my laziness completed the deal. Thanks!
Reply to Donniehm… real life? But this takes the assumption that the contestants have lives to tend to.
Reply to Allen