[tournament-org] GroupsInGoDraw

[Geoff Kaniuk]

Sometimes players from the same family attend a tournament, and it is 
often a good idea to make sure they do not play each other. For this 
reason GoDraw has a feature called 'Groups' which enables you to tag 
certain players as belonging to a group with the attribute that members 
of the group 'must not play' each other. I hope that organisers are 
familiar with the feature, which is described in the GoDraw online 
manual http://www.britgo.org/godrawsys/help/drawmaster.html

The description there explains how to set up a group by directly editing 
the Group field in the register. Another way is to use the Tools>Groups 
menu where you can simply select players and then add to a group with 
attributes chosen from a drop-down list.

There are also situations where some players will travel round to 
different clubs, so would prefer not to have to play the same people at 
a local tournament.  Again you can set up a group, but now with the 
group attribute 'prefer not to play'.

It is better to do this than just changing club names, hoping that the 
basic rule 'try to pair players from different clubs' will do the trick. 
Group selection gets higher priority than club names.  Also it means 
that at the end of the tournament you do not have to go around 
re-setting player clubs before you send the results in to the BGA.

There are situations where you would want to avoid a particular player 
from being drawn against a specific group. For example someone who 
enters at a suspiciously high grade who has not played in a tournament 
before and you might want to avoid pairings above the bar in the early 
rounds to get a better assessment. There are other examples of this 
special case, which falls outside the remit of the groups feature.

So here is our problem: We have a player A who should not play against 
players B,C,D,E,F,G,H for at least the first three rounds of a 6 round 
tournament.

How would you solve this?

-- 
Geoff

33 Ashbury Close, Cambridge CB1 3RW 01223 710582