The Pair Teammates? section of the Add/Edit a Section Dialog Box allows you to control how the pairing of teammates should be handled. This setting applies to both combined (individual/team) tournaments and pure team tournaments.
You have three options to choose from: "Yes", "No", and "Only if Necessary".
- If you choose Yes, WinTD will ignore team identifications when pairing players.
- If you choose No, WinTD will do whatever it can to not pair teammates. In a large section, there is usually no problem with this. In a small section, however, it may produce pairings which are far from what players would expect in a Swiss System. This is not a problem with WinTD itself. If most of the players at either the top or the bottom of a small section are from the same team, you can either pair teammates or you will have to live with pairings which have players with very different scores playing. If you stick with "No" and a late-round pairing produces games between players two or more points apart in the standings, WinTD will warn you of this, so you can take action if you wish. A possible way to handle this is to undo the pairings, then pair again, this time putting in 2.0 (or whatever number) in the Don't Drop Players More Than box in the Pair a Round Dialog Box. This pushes the penalty for a drop of more than 2.0 (or whatever) higher than that for pairing teammates. There will usually be a way of pairing which keeps the number of boards with teammates paired to one or two and keeps the score gaps within reason.
- If you choose Only if Necessary, WinTD will try to pair a section without pairing teammates. But it will not shift players out of a score group just to avoid pairing teammates. If a score group has eight players, five of whom are from a single team, WinTD will pair two of the teammates with each other, and the other three with players from other teams.
The "Only if Necessary" choice does not precisely match any of the options given in the USCF rule book. You can get variations 28N2 (Don't pair teammates unless it's the last round and one is first and would have to be dropped ...) and 28N1 (the +2 option) by choosing No in this section, and then putting the trigger score in the Pair Teammates At or Above box in the Pair a Round Dialog Boxwhen you get to that point. For instance, in round six, you would put 5.0 (assuming this is the last round) to get 28N2 and 3.5 (+2 after five rounds) to get 28N1. Note, by the way, that these operate the same way as "only if necessary" applied just to a few high score groups. For instance, if the top two players out of three in the lead pack are teammates, they will not be paired, since it's possible to pair the group by dropping one of them and pairing the other with the third player.
If you are running a team tournament, you can use the Team ID field to prevent "A" and "B" teams from the same school or organization from playing each other. The teams themselves are actually considered to be separate individuals so the Team ID field is free for this type of use. For instance, with two teams from Central High, you might have teams with names Central High A and Central High B, and give them both a team ID of CENTRL. Then use No for the Pair Teammates choice.
If you check the Avoid Pairing Same Club? box, WinTD will check to see if two players have the same "Club Code" and will try to avoid pairing them. This is basically the same logic as is used in the Only if Necessary teammate pairing - it will try not to pair "clubmates," but will if the alternative is to drop them both to a lower score group. You can use club codes with or without team codes. Where both are used, WinTD gives priority to avoiding pairing teammates. Club codes can be used, for instance, to avoid pairing family members, or to avoid pairing players from the same school district.
Avoid Pairing Same State is similar to the club preference described above, but WinTD won't work quite so hard to avoid them. If you select this, a pairing of two players from the same state are treated as a pairing flaw on a par with a color equalization failure. So long as score groups are fairly large, the effect of this preference is to change the set of swaps made used to correct colors.