Tournament Director – TOOLS & FORMS

Crosstable forms (Wall Charts) for Round-Robin events

Below is a selection of Round-Robin crosstables that can be printed. With these forms, the task of running RR-events, even massive ones, is smooth and practically effortless. The Round-Robin system often is a better way to run Blitz events than the customary Swiss-System (“SS”) format. The links in the table open the appropriate chart as an html file. You can click here to download a zipped set of all the documents as MS Word files.

When printing the Round Robin crossables linked from the table below, be sure to select "Landscape" mode for your printer to avoid cropping the last columns.

No. of Players in RR-Event	No. of Results (2 for each game) that will be entered in a RR-Event of that size	No. of “extra heat” pairings provided (for small sections)	No. of Pages	COLORS:
3 – 4	6 or 12	3 extra heats = 4 total	1	Normal	Reversed
5 – 6	20 or 30	3 extra heats = 4 total	1	Normal	Reversed
7 – 8	42 or 56	2 extra heats = 3 total	1	Normal	Reversed
9 – 10	72 or 90	1 extra heat = 2 total	1	Normal	Reversed
11 – 12	110 or 132	–	1	Normal	Reversed
13 – 14	156 or 182	–	2	Normal	Reversed
15 – 16	210 or 240	–	2	Normal	Reversed
17 – 18	272 or 306	–	2	Normal	Reversed
19 – 20	342 or 380	–	2	Normal	Reversed
21 – 22	420 or 462	–	2	Normal	Reversed
23 – 24	506 or 552	–	2	Normal	Reversed

On these crosstables, for each entrant there are two rows:

• The first row shows, for each round, that player’s color and opponent number.
• The second row shows – in the cell’s upper-rightmost corner – the board number on which that player will play (the remaining area in these cells is where players pencil-in their result each round).

As everyone returns to the crosstable after each round to mark their own result, each player need note just two things for the next round: the color they will play, and (most importantly) the board number. Players need NOT memorize whom they will face – by simply going to the correct board, they will meet their next opponent there.

Obviously any Round-Robin event will have either an even or an odd number of entrants. If there is an even number, everyone has a game every round. But if there is an odd number, each round someone will have the BYE – whoever would’ve been paired vs. the last-numbered player IF there had been one more entrant. When the TD sees the number of participants is an odd number, he should (after printing the appropriate crosstable) simply mark out each player’s pairing vs. the last Pairing Number, so the one player each round getting the BYE will realize it.

Note: In all these crosstables every player’s one pairing vs. the last PN is underlined, so that they “stand out”. However there is a clearly visible pattern (the same in any size section) as to where these pairings appear. Player #1 will always face the last PN in the last round. Starting there you go down row by row, each time sliding two rounds to the left, doing so until you’ve just marked out the pairing of the player who would’ve faced the last PN in the first round (this will always be the player-# that is exactly half the section’s size, i.e. Player #6 in an 11-or-12-man event). Going down to the next row, you then start back in the next-to-last round and continue in the same manner, each row down again sliding two rounds to the left.

Regarding the “COLORS” column: “Normal” RR-pairings always assign the upper half (of any size section) an extra White, and the lower half an extra Black (assuming an even number of players; of course if there is an odd number, everyone has an even number of games, thus an equal number of Whites and Blacks). Note that, in a local club – with the same players often in each event – using the “normal” colors every time can create a problem. After signup, if the entrants are re-sequenced by rating – putting the same top player in the #1 spot – then that #1 player will always get the same colors vs. the 3-4 nearest-rated players who are always in the same order just beneath him, i.e. always Black vs. #3 and #5 and always White vs. #2 and #4, whether it’s a 5-or-6-man event or a 23-or-24-man event (this pattern is consistent for the #1 player, but is less and less a problem for each following Pairing Number). If a club regularly does re-sequence the entrants by rating, at times they might want to use “Reversed” colors – so that the players who seem to always be player-#s 2, 3, 4, etc., can sometimes have the opposite color vs. the top player that they each would’ve normally had.

Regarding the “extra heats” column: In sections of 10 or less players, the repeating columns simply allow the possibility of multiple “heats” (each heat reverses the colors of the heat before it).