2025 PanAms - Part 2: Additional details and personal reflections

As I promised, here comes the second part of my tale of the 2025 Pan American Intercollegiate Team Championship. If you missed Part 1, read that first!

I have so many thoughts regarding the event this year, and the event in general, hard to decide where to start.

The main headache has definitely been the pairing software:
As many of you might know, in the US we have two softwares that are US Chess approved and able to produce tournament reports that can be uploaded to US Chess's site. These two softwares are Swisssys and WinTD. I'm a swisssys gal, and I've used that for almost all the tournaments I ran in the past. The advantage of Swisssys is that it's also FIDE approved, so US Chess office actually requires us to submit a swisssys file of the event, since it's FIDE-rated.

WinTD vs. Swisssys

However, Swisssys has been failing in the last few PanAms (Seattle in 2022 Jan, McAllen in 2023 Jan and now in Charlotte 2024 Jan). It runs beautifully with individual Swiss, RR, fixed roster team events except for fixed roster events that needs to allow to select lineup, and select the alternate player who sits out. Current version has bugs in both the team order/lineup selection part, as well as in the team standing (displaying for example W W but only adding it up to 1.0 points! -- I'm not kidding you, going to add a screen shot to see for yourself!)
I'm not going to bore you with more details, and workaround solutions that we have found. But it has been a struggle to be vigilant of bugs, and do the same work multiple times.

Glenn and I have been running backroom simultaneously for this event: he ran WinTD, and I did the same work on Swisssys, and we compared. This was one of our strategy to tackle the errors. However, WinTD has not been without errors and bugs as well. It constantly switched lineup reverting back to the top 4 players in the board order, and been incorrectly displaying players on the pairing sheets.

If you have ever dealt with buggy software, you know how annoying it is. It's frustrating on multiple levels: the event would be much more enjoyable for us, arbiters, and even with our best effort, these bugs sneak in and while we are grateful for the coaches and players' careful eyes and letting us know if anything is incorrect, it's a bit embarrassing, because I know I am better than this. So it's tough, mentally, to keep it together, focus and keep triple checking everything, and basically power through each round. It also results in much less sleep, since you are at the venue late night, often until 11pm or so, and I could not get to sleep when up in my room, I kept double checking results, and standings, and was up early to start inputting lineups and make sure that all still correct. I averaged less than 5 hours of sleep over the 3 nights that I was there. Anyway, personal vent over.

Needless to say, working side by side Swissys and WinTD, we can safely say that WinTD produced better pairings, so we went with that and I matched that in Swisssys.

All other parts of the event went fine, but of course there are other details that I'd love to share:

1. Timelines
Timelines are tight and inevitably causing stress and rush, and you probably can guess, rushing an arbiter leads to no good Getting the lineups 60 mins before the round start - we want to give as much time for the coaches to prepare the players to the opponents, but we also want to make sure that our work is correct, and not misleading the players and coaches. This is why we took the suggestion of one of the player and started posting the lineups as soon as deadline has passed, and not worry about posting the full list of board parings. We are also suggesting the College Committee to update the rules of this event to give a 90 minutes deadline for the lineup submission.

Same thing with the final result turnaround. Last round start at 9:30am and results get in around 2-2:30pm. The award ceremony was listed at 2:30pm, which was unrealistic. But even at 3pm it was very rushed. I really think that we need a minimum an hour to look through everything, and finalize the list of winners. Every year it's a rush to get those out. I'm suggesting to the committee to officially push back the award ceremony to minimum 6 but maybe even 7 hours after the last round start time. 

2. No Chess-result page
I know many of the players and coaches, and frankly, me too, would love to have the chess-result page for this event. But it was simply unrealistic, to work on both Swisssys and Swiss Manager with such tight turnaround. (Swiss Manager is the world wide fide approved pairing software that most of Europe and many other countries around the world use.) I'm still thinking about re-creating the event in SM, and posting it on CR. I also have to admit, being an arbiter from the US, I don't have much practice in Swiss Manager, since it does not have a way to extract US Chess rating reports. So we have to run events on Swisssys. I forced myself to learn and get practice, and I'm now at a point where I feel comfortable running a Swiss event, fast, accurate and efficient.
My very first one that I didn't have Swisssys and Swiss Manager side by side was our company Meetup events, including our fun Greenpawn showdown (FIDE-rated blitz) event with no less than 9 GMs (including Magnus!) and 8 IMs along with 11 WGM/WIMs! I was secretly very proud of myself running that very smoothly

Now the thrilling parts:

As I said in Part 1 of this blog post series, PanAms is always one of my favorite event of the year, and I'm super thankful, honored and happy to get invited back by different organizers. I know it's not easy to budget in an arbiter from the west coast to go to an east coast event. Why it's my favorite event? The main selfish reason is that it pushes me to my limits, and keeping me sharp, and encourages me to learn!
But then also the people:

The colleagues:
It's always great to work with amazing people! Some are long time friends and some I'm working with the first time. Isn't this the case at most event? Absolutely. And this year's PanAms wasn't any different. Besides my old friends: Glenn, Jim and Christina, who I enjoy working with them ever time of course:
This was my first event working with Maya Mayers - our selfie is in the thumbnail - who is a fellow female IA, we are two of the 4 active female IAs in the USA! Her main job at this event was to set up and operate the DGT boards, and also to help out on the floor. She is such a hard working, kind, patient person, I enjoyed getting to know her a bit better!
It was also my first time at the Charlotte Chess Center. I have known Peter Giannatos for many years now, he actually visited the 2018 PanAms in San Francisco that I've organized, but I never got to work with him given that I'm across the country I was so thankful that he found a way to have me there, and I could see the efficiency he is running his events and the great crew he has at his helm!

The players, coaches and friends:
It's such a rewarding experience running a good event for players, titled or non-titled equally. Many of them are aware how complex it is running an event, and that they rely on us being able to play in events. I always looking forward catching up with many of them who I see at other events.
The heartwarming feeling when you see a player grow up, running events for them when they were in elementary or high school, and now meeting them with their university/college team, it's super awesome! I saw several players who grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area, and had a great time seeing them play!
And of course my good friends who are coming with teams, starting with Annastasia who is Webster team's angel. We have worked events, we organized events, and I see her taking care of those college players like her own brothers.

I will also make a Part 3 with some of the chess rulings that happened during the event. So check back in a day!