If you have a tournament large enough that you need to use more than one computer, our recommendation is that you keep the entire tournament on a single computer as long as possible. Adds, drops, section switches and bye requests are generally easiest to handle when there is a single point of entry. The best time to split the tournament onto different machines is just before the first round is paired, which makes it easier to recombine the sections at the end.

When splitting the sections among the machines, we would strongly recommend putting identical copies of the tournament on each, rather than attempting to extract the working sections. Aside from being simpler (you just pass around a flash drive, or copy the PTOZ file over the network or using the cloud), it makes things like the inevitable section corrections simpler, since all TD's have all the registered players on their copy of the PTO file. For instance, if a player was registered in section X, but should be in Y, the TD handling section Y can just drag the player out of his copy of X into Y.

 

Most TD's prefer to shift their working section(s) up to the top of the Section window. You do this by selecting the sections in the section window and using the Up icon to move them.

 

WinTD Licenses

If you are using more than one computer, you should make sure that you and the TD's have one license per computer using it.

 

"Drop" section

 

A number of TD's make a habit of including a "Drop" section in the tournament file. Players who drop out early enough to receive an entry refund are moved into that "section." Players who withdraw later are checked out in the normal fashion.

 

Preference Files

It's a very good idea to create a common preference file and ensure that all the machines have it. Make sure that all the computers are set to use that file as the default when the program loads up. The following are the choices which are usually most critical:

 

On the Pairing Sheet Tab

 

 

On the Charts Tab

 

You first need to decide what you're going to post. Wall charts have more detail, but take three times as much room as the single line cross tables. In addition to these, you have a third option of printing a configured player window (described below on window styles), which is similar to the cross table, but is more flexible. Once you've decided on the general type, decide what information you wish to include and set it here.

 

On the Pairing Rules Tab

 

You probably want to enforce a common "Pairing Effort," so fill that in here. Among the others, "Full Color History" gives the current US Chess and FIDE rule regarding allocation of color among players with different color histories.

 

Other Tabs

 

The "LAST, First in Reports" is a common choice in big tournaments as it makes the names stand out a bit better on those large expanses of paper.

 

Player Window Styles

 

The window styles are also saved on the preference file. You need to open a player window and either do Edit>Change Layout or hit the Change Layout icon to pop up the Change Layout Dialog Box. You can create all your styles at one time. Just set the fields, click "Define Style," reset the fields, "Define Style" again, etc.

 

Save!!!

 

Make sure you save the preferences once you're done.

 

Recombining Sections

 

At the end of the tournament, you'll have a set of tournament files, each of which has only a few "live" sections. For post-tournament processing, however, it's generally handiest to combine these into a single file. First, create an empty tournament file. If you didn't create one to start, the simplest way to do this is to take one of your working PTOZ files and do File>Copy as Template. Open the copy file (it isn't opened automatically; we would recommend that you close the original file first) and use Section>Delete to remove the sections.

 

There are two ways to add live sections to the empty file:

 

•Do File>Include Sections from… using each of the other extracted files. This will give you the option to bring in only those sections which have a non-zero number of paired rounds (or all sections if you want).

•Or, create a text file with a list of file names for the separate .PTOZ files which are being used. Do File>Import from Listed Files. This will import data only from the sections which have a non-zero number of paired rounds.

If you need to do this more than one time (for instance, after each round), the best way to handle it is to do File>Save Tournament As... after combining the sections, which will keep the empty file intact for later use.

 

Copyright © 2026 Thomas Doan