Tournament Directing Software

Software can be of great assistance when Organizing a Tournament/Discussion. Such programs typically manage a registry of players, manage the draw for each round, and allow match results to be entered. If you have no experience of performing the draw you would be well advised to use one.

Popular Choices

• AAGo Tournament Written for the Argentine Go Association, it uses Swiss pairings and tries to follow the model of the World Amateur Go Championship (WAGC).

• AccelRat Hails from the US and uses AGA ratings in determining the draw.

• AGATHA, Australian software available from the Australian Go Association web site.

• GoClubsOnline is a web-based application for club organizers that includes online registration for tournaments and events, an integrated pairings module, club game results, a club library catalog, book-keeping and auto-syncing with AGA and EGF player ratings. The suite of integrated tools covers all aspects of managing a club and was developed by members of the Santa Fe Go Club. While it is the first system to be Certified AGA Compliant with the AGA's reporting and pairings standards, it surpasses them in many areas.

• GoDraw Can handle McMahon and Swiss pairings. (Windows) Default program in the UK.

• MacMahon - The Program is popular in Europe. It's written by Christoph Gerlach, runs on windows and comes with a thesis explaining its correctness. Has its own page on SL.

• MacTD by Jared Roach. This software is written specifically for Macintosh, it requires HyperCard. It works very well (despite its basic user interface) and supports many pairing algorithms, not only McMahon : Equality, Swiss, MM, Equality-MM, Swiss-MM, Sequential MM, Desperation, Pre-pairs Winner. Despite his statement of not having much time to better his program, Jared is keenly available, and he has modified his software to meet my specific needs in running tournaments.DJ

• OpenGotha is a new Java implementation of Gotha with additional features. Includes auto-data fetch from the EGF and AGA. OpenGotha was written by the author of Gotha, Luc Vannier? of France.

• PyTD

Unusual or Outdated

• AutoKorsak - appears to only be used in the Ukraine

• EPM - El Pimp Masiin, only available in Finnish, an English Language version may well appear eventually

• Goblin seems a little experimental. Developed to use the Hahn System.

• GoCarlos McMahon pairing used for the championship of Slovakia

• GoMMTour by a team of students under supervision of Niek van Diepen (MS-DOS)

• GoPair perl program, you will need some computer experience to install this program.

• MGA GoTD is a Java program, open source, for directing tournaments, see http://mgatdirector.sourceforge.net/ . Aimed at small to medium tournaments (16-80 people). Handles pairing and bands. Saves in the AGA tournament reporting format. Runs on Windows, Linux, and Mac. Open source and totally free.

• PAIR, the oldest of them all by Niek van Diepen himself (MS-DOS).

• SortMatch.ca is an experimental system similar to McMahon or Swiss-system tournaments, but instead feeds match results into Glicko2 ratings to order competitors and to generate subsequent pairings.

• Swiss Master produces nice looking and very functional output like this: NK Go 2007 including (automatic) Cross tables with linked hotspots, subsheets for diff. rounds etc. etc. Costs around 50 euros.

• WinTD is a tournament director's program linked above, that also comes on the AGA Go Starter CD Version 4.0 distributed in Peter Shotwell's "Go Basics". Its Vista-readiness is unknown, but getting it to run on Windows XP may be challenging since it requires something called "Microsoft Access".