EPM

EPM, also known as El Pimp Masiin (pimp=Pairing In McMahon Pits and I'm sorry for the joke in the name) is a pairing program by Tapio Vuorinen. After trying several different pairing programs along the years, few of the Finnish tournament organizers decided they needed something better and I (Tapio Vuorinen) decided to deliver it.

Main features include

• Round-robin pairing
• McMahon pairing
• Bonus tournaments (tournaments where you get points for drinking alcohol)
• Even, handicap and reduced handicap games
• Developer implements changes and new features according to reasonable requests and doesn't have any "this is the way this should be done and that's final" -opinions.

EPM has been used to pair around twenty tournaments so far, including the six biggest tournaments ever in Finland. The software is currently frozen and will be rewritten "some day soon". The current version runs in text console and tested platforms include Solaris/Sparc, Linux/x86, Mac OS X and Cygwin. Windows' text console cannot be stretched big enough, sorry :-)

Test runs have been promising, EPM can deliver pairings for tournaments with up to 2000 players in a reasonable time on a standard PC.

MK Is it downloadable? Free or commercial?

EPM is and will be free. It is not released to public use yet because of a few reasons. a) the UI sucks, b) the software speaks only Finnish :) There is a total rewrite coming on, can't really say when.