Dallas Johnson writes:

> I am directing an 8-round NAST this weekend (which Steve Pellinen
> is allowing under the new rules for this NAST series). This
> requires a shift away from using the built in NAST pairings (I
> think) because of the additional rounds.

Steve does not have a description on his web site yet of how he
would like 8-round NAST satellites to be paired; if someone can
draw my attention to it when he does, I'll update the tsh NAST
command within the usual two weeks.

> I will likely have 14
> attendees, so the way I have addressed it is to create two teams
> of 7, and pair a team round robin, followed by one round of KOTH.
> By putting players 1, 4, 5, 8, 9, 12, 13 into team A, and the rest
> into team B, I accomplish a snake round robin, which seems to work
> very nicely in my dry runs. Here are my questions:
>
> 1. Is this a good way to handle the pairings, or is there a
> superior method?

That seems reasonable. If you had a multiple of eight players,
you could do.

config initial_snaked = 1
config initial_schedule = 7

This will produce some sort of pairings even with 14 players (I
think it will be an attempt at an evenly depleted round robin
schedule for the whole group), but yours are probably fairer.

> 2. The dryrun gave error messages that scores were missing to
> allow the pairing of round 8 in rounds 2 through 6. I didnt know
> why it was looking to pair that round so early, but it seemed to
> work fine otherwise (and paired round 8 just fine once round 7 had
> scores), and when I stepped through a round-by-round dry run, there
> were no glitches. Is there any cause for concern arising from
> that error message?

No, they're nothing to worry about it. The dryrun command works
very primitively, alternately asking for pairings and adding
random scores. If the pairings it wants aren't available, it
adds more scores and tries again.

John
--
John Chew (poslfit on MD) * jjchew@... *
http://www.poslfit.com