Deleting engines from a tournament

[Gábor Szots]

I have just noticed that inadvertentyly I had created a tournament with several (11) engines I had not wanted to include. They have all played 6 games each already but I don't want them to continue. How do I delete them from the tournament (I want to keep their games, though)?

[Graham Banks]

I have just noticed that inadvertentyly I had created a tournament with several (11) engines I had not wanted to include. They have all played 6 games each already but I don't want them to continue. How do I delete them from the tournament (I want to keep their games, though)?

Which GUI?

[Gábor Szots]

I found a solution: I cloned the tournament, then deleted the excessive engines from the list of participants and started a new tournament.

[Gábor Szots]

I have just noticed that inadvertentyly I had created a tournament with several (11) engines I had not wanted to include. They have all played 6 games each already but I don't want them to continue. How do I delete them from the tournament (I want to keep their games, though)?

Which GUI?

Oh, I thought the forum told it.

[H.G.Muller]

I have just noticed that inadvertentyly I had created a tournament with several (11) engines I had not wanted to include. They have all played 6 games each already but I don't want them to continue. How do I delete them from the tournament (I want to keep their games, though)?

Starting a new tourney is of course always possible. But what is currently not possible is to continue a running tournament with a changed number of participants, and keep the results of the games that have already been played between participants that you want to keep. What makes this so difficult is that at the beginning of the tournament WB decides on the playing schedule, i.e. it makes a mapping of game sequence numbers and pairings (the latter as nr of white and black player in the participants list). With a different number of participants (or games per pairing, or tourney type) this would be a completely different mapping, so the sequence number of the games that have been played would change in a non-trivial way. And WB keeps track of which games have been played only by sequence number.

Perhaps, as a poor man's solution, I should add the option to forfeit a certain participant. This then would not alter the tournament schedule, but it would consider the forfeited participant as a 'bye', and just skip all future games of that participant. This would be easy to do, because it is very similar to what I do now when you replace a participant: in that case all games of the replaced participant have to be reset to 'unplayed' (a space in the -results string in the tourney file). In the forfeit case it would not only have to go through all past games to see if they were played, but go through all past and future games, and mark them as 'played', so that no WB instance would select them again for playing.

An alternative would be to just treat a participant name 'BYE' as special, and skip all games of a thus named participant. Then you could use the existing 'Replace' button to effectively remove a participant from the tourney, by replacing it for a BYE. This would be a good method anyway, because even with a special 'Forfeit' button you would have to indicate which participant you want to forfeit.

[Gábor Szots]

An alternative would be to just treat a participant name 'BYE' as special, and skip all games of a thus named participant. Then you could use the existing 'Replace' button to effectively remove a participant from the tourney, by replacing it for a BYE. This would be a good method anyway, because even with a special 'Forfeit' button you would have to indicate which participant you want to forfeit.

This looks like a good solution. However, to start a new tourney is not a big problem either and probably will not be needed often.

[Gábor Szots]

An alternative would be to just treat a participant name 'BYE' as special, and skip all games of a thus named participant. Then you could use the existing 'Replace' button to effectively remove a participant from the tourney, by replacing it for a BYE. This would be a good method anyway, because even with a special 'Forfeit' button you would have to indicate which participant you want to forfeit.

This looks like a good solution. However, to start a new tourney is not a big problem either and probably will not be needed often.

I have also found another, if not very elegant, solution: I simply rename the path to the engines so that WB won't find them and their games will be skipped.