I’ve been awarded the position of chess coach at a local school, despite the fact that a) I’ve never competed in a chess tournament, let alone coached participants in one; and b) I’m not a particularly good chess player. (The job is strictly voluntary, and two things I love are kids and chess, so why not? And [del]nobody else wanted it[/del] they weren’t getting the high caliber of people they wanted to volunteer for the job.)
Anyway, the Illinois Elementary School Association has handed out the rules, and in reading them I see that I’m in over my head already. For example, on Page 1:
…and then on Page 2:
Yeah. I have no idea what any of this means. Can someone explain it in layman’s terms?
You should contact your local chess club…I promise there’s someone there who will be willing to help you understand this stuff.
I can explain stacking, for what it’s worth; it’s basically submitting a team list that’s not in the same order as the players’ ratings. Imagine two teams: one has a hot-shot player and 3 mediocre players, and they submit their team list in that order. So the coach of the second team looks at the list and happens to have one really crappy player and three decent ones…so he plays the crappy one against the hot-shot and hopes to dominate the other match-ups.
Generally speaking, in a swiss tournament pairing system the teams are ranked from highest average rating to lowest, and then highest plays lowest in the first round, 2nd-highest plays second lowest, etc. Then [I’m going to stop here. is this really going to help you? I think you really need to consult someone; try googling swiss system] W/respect to the ‘individual tournament’ issue, all the teams are competing against each other, but also at the end of the tournament all the players who played ‘first board’ are compared and someone wins that comparison; all the players who played second board are compared; etc.
What it boils down to is you should determine, to the best of your ability, who your best player is, and give him “first board”, and who your second-best player is, and so on.
Is this the first year for competitive chess at your school, or your first year and they already had a team? My son had a provisional rating after playing in one sanctioned tournament, so you might ask the kids if they have a ranking. Use those rankings if they exist, and do what Chronos said for any other kids.
For the Tie-Break System, I’m going to suggest that you don’t really care. The people running the tournament have to have some system to break ties, and those are what they use.
The swiss system is a tournament system, like round robin or knockout. Basically it matches up players who have roughly the same score so far in the tournament. For example, the US Championship is running right now; here are the matchups for the 7th round. You can see that each match has players with similar scores. In a swiss tournament nobody gets eliminated - everyone plays all the rounds, even if they lose many games.
If you’re not running the tournament itself, you don’t have to worry about this. The tournament director will handle all the pairings, and tell you who your team will be playing in each round.
“Board” in this context has two related meanings. First, it is like a ranking of the players on a team. This is used something like a position in other sports: people might say “I am board 3 for Team X” as they might say “I am quarterback for Team Y” in football. Second, it’s a way of specifying the physical board in the tournament hall where a match will be played. Your best player plays your opponent’s best player on Board 1, your 2nd best player plays their second best player on Board 2, and so on. In that US Championship link, Shulman is playing Onischuk on Board 1.
Stacking was explained by Maserschmidt.
The tiebreakers you don’t need to worry about. They’re just a method of ranking players/teams who end up with the same number of points at the end of the tournament. They use things like “the total score of the players you beat” or “avergage rating of the players you played”. The details aren’t important from your perspective, it’s another thing that the tournament director will handle.