Dialog Box: FIDE Random Tournament Generation

This pops up when you do FIDE>Generate Random Tournaments. The ability to generate random tournaments is a requirement for software to have its pairing engine endorsed by FIDE.

Number to Generate

Choose the number of tournaments that you want to generate. Note that this generates and pairs them through all rounds. Depending upon how large you allow them to be, the average time to do a tournament can be about 5 seconds, while the maximum can be a minute or longer so if you are doing quite a few, allow for that. The limit is 9999.

Number of Players

Provide a lower bound and an upper bound. The number of players for a tournament is selected randomly with a value in the range from the lower to the upper, with the number chosen slightly favoring numbers closer to the lower value.

Number of Rounds

Provide a lower bound and an upper bound. The number of rounds is selected randomly with a value in the range from the lower to the upper, but with a value that adapts to the number of players.

Pairing Method

This offers a choice between the standard FIDE Dutch methods and the Baku Accelerated pairings.

Write to Directory

Choose the directory into which you want to write the generated tournaments.

File Name Prefix

Each generated tournament creates two files: a WinTD PTOZ file and a corresponding FIDE TRF (Tournament Report Format) file. The file names for those are created by appending a four digit sequence number (prefixed with 0's if necessary) to your chosen File Name Prefix. For instance, if the Write to Directory is c:\chess\fide and the File Name Prefix is test, the first randomly generated tournament fill be represented by c:\chess\fide\test0001.ptoz and c:\chess\fide\test0001.trf and the next by the same with 0002.

Method of Generation

In generating a tournament, WinTD first chooses a random number of players in the range for the Number of Players. This is weighted to somewhat favor the smaller values. It then chooses a random number of rounds in the range for Number of Rounds. The number of rounds will generally be on the order of the square root of the number of players. The players are randomly assigned ratings (generally in the range from 1000 to 2500). Before a round is paired, a (small) random number of players are assigned "byes" (either zero or 1/2 point) and the remaining players are paired. The results are simulated based upon the Elo expectations given the difference between ratings in the pairing. A small percentage of games are chosen to be forfeits. The byes and forfeits are to exercise the handling of unplayed games.