Hosting a Tournament

[Wizardly]

I forgot to mention "rhetorical," didn't I?

Besides that, I'm just being dumb...oh yeah, Div II.

The REAL rhetorical question is, "Is a 13 year old earning his B at an age restricted tournament as good as a Senior B?"

[JEC]

Originally posted by Wizardly
So the real quesion (off topic) is: is a 13 year old B as good as a Senior B?

So, what is the most arduous path to earning/validating your "B"? I think it would be finishing 9-16 in div. I, followed by 9-16 in div I-A, followed by 1-4 in div II. Thus, whether the kid was 13 or not when earned his B is irrelevant. This was a "Senior B" earned at a NAC. I know several "B" earned at regional or local tournaments who are less formidable fencers that this kid.

[epeemike81]

Originally posted by JEC
So, what is the most arduous path to earning/validating your "B"? I think it would be finishing 9-16 in div. I, followed by 9-16 in div I-A, followed by 1-4 in div II. Thus, whether the kid was 13 or not when earned his B is irrelevant. This was a "Senior B" earned at a NAC. I know several "B" earned at regional or local tournaments who are less formidable fencers that this kid.

5-8 get B's at 1A, not 9-16.

-m

[JEC]

my mistake. however, it does not change the argument or my perceived difficulty ladder. do you agree?

[Capt. Slo-mo]

A kid at our club earned a "B" as a 12-year old by winning a Div 2, rearned the "B" at Div 1A, then won an "A" and rearned it at the cadet/jr level. Since turning 13 this year, the fencer has re-earned the "A" again, including a top 8 finish in Div 1.
So occasionally, a youth fencer does has a valid high ranking.

[Dee EffEll]

Originally posted by DJ Apostrophe
on the fencingtime thought...

tried fencing time
tried x-seed
tried point control
tried En Garde
tried writing my own (still ongoing)

result...
like En Garde the best.
-w

Originally posted by epeemike81
seconded.

en garde IS the best.

-m

What makes en garde better than fencingtime?

[DJ Apostrophe]

They both have their strong points, but here are the things i like about engarde better than fencing time:

You can add someone to the pools after you have created them and printed the pool sheets. Say you forget to check someone in, you can just throw them in the appropriate pool without having to recreate all the pools from scratch.

I like being able to see the reports before I print them, I look at them during the even for all kinds of reasons, and Fencing Time just wants to dump them to the printer.

Imputting the pool results in Engarde is much easier, you just have to hit the number of touches scored or a v for a V5 bout, you don't have to hit tab after each bout, you can just use the arrow keys to navigate around the pool if trying to get to a particular bout. I like the fact that engarde catches you if you enter something wrong. I.e. this past weekend I had a pool sheet that was messed up, both boxes of one bout had both competitors losing, one said 3 the other said 2. Fencing time just assumes that the person with three touches won, whereas engarde alerts you to the fact that you dont have a person winning, entering the score with less than five touches is easy, you just click the 'victory with score button'.

Not that its highly useful, but i like the 'auto complete pools' button in engarde

I like the fact that engarde alerts you visibly when you have entered all the pools, you don't sit around waiting for the last pool that hasnt come in, when they've all come in. It also gives you a nice screen telling you what pools/de bouts you are waiting on, fencing time lacks this. Its really nice when you can see who is running behind, wether it is a pool or a quadrant of a de tableaux

The interface for entering the DE Bouts in engarde is much cleaner. Over all, there is less mouse work required to complete a task in engarde, most of it is covered with an alt key, and one letter, i do not have to click anywhere when I am running a tournament in engarde, and it makes things go much faster... you can do this with fencing time also, but you have to tab everywhere... example, when entering de bouts, each bout in engarde has a code, there is a letter which corresponds to which table it is in (A is gold medal bout, B is round of 4, etc...) and a corresponding number 1 is the bout on the top of the page, 2 is the next one, etc. It makes imput much easier.

I like that engarde demands less system resources than Fencing time does. It also takes up less screen real estate, making it easier to navigate.

One of the strongest points of engarde over fencing time is the ability to go back and change things. There is much more flexibility in general with everything that engarde does, and I like that, I like being able to make the decisions as opposed to having the program make them for me.

I love the fact that Engarde makes HTML files of pool results, ranking after pools, and DE tableaux, and final results, without having to do anything, two keyboard commands and you have html files ready to post. I don't know if Fencing Time does this or not.

Oh yeah... and engarde is free... it doesn't cost $50.

Things I don't like about engarde:

It doesn't handle USFA ratings.
Well, that's because it was written by a french guy. Not a big deal as I now have the corresponding "Fencer Code" (this is how engarde does seeding) memorized. It is a pretty easy scheme, and nice because it is more flexible than the USFA system alone. we use a four digit number for the fencer code , where the first digit corresponds to the letter 1=a 2=b 3=c 4=d 5=e and the next digit corresponds to when it was earned 0=current year 1=1 year ago 2=2 years ago 3=3 years ago...
then we use two zeros unless we have a reason to tweak the seeding. Unclassified fencers are entered as 9999

Why this is useful: Two examples
1: While running the Five College Open, Tim Morehouse decided to fence the open sabre. Being 5th on the senior points list, he obviously should have been seeded first. I set his fencer code to 900 or something similar

2: While running the New England Division youth regional back in October, a majority of the fencers were (obviously) unclassified. We used the number of months they had been fencing to help seed the tournament. We subtracted the number of months they had been fencing from 9999 to get their fencer code. It worked very well.

Obviously you need to do the classifications awarded by hand after the tournament, but I have the chart almost memorized by now, and it takes 2 minutes.

Another thing I don't like:
The high seed doesn't automatically end up in the large pool. The FIE doesn't do this, so it doesn't automatically do it. Most of the time it works out ok, but ocassionally you have to shift some one into the high-seed's pool. Again, a two minute prospect

All in all, I like engarde the best.

NB: Engarde is the software the FIE uses to run the world cups.

-w

[epeemike81]

Originally posted by DJ Apostrophe
They both have their strong points, but here are the things i like about engarde better than fencing time:

You can add someone to the pools after you have created them and printed the pool sheets. Say you forget to check someone in, you can just throw them in the appropriate pool without having to recreate all the pools from scratch.

This is also useful in fixing misseeds. At Sectionals (run with en garde) I was seeded in a pool with a clubmate. they simply swapped me with another fencer of the same rating, without having to reseed and reprint the other 8 pools that weren't changing.

This problem was caused by the fact that en garde does separation by division, and then club, but doesn't check for people in the same club, but different divisions. does anybody know if this problem exists in fencing time??

regardless of whether it does or not, I'm still partial to en garde, but it would be interesting to know.

-m

[dberke]

Since I'm the person who wrote Fencing Time, I have a few comments and clarifications to add to this discussion. There are many good ideas here... and since I'm currently working on the next version of Fencing Time, I may be able to address some of your complaints...

Originally posted by DJ Apostrophe
They both have their strong points, but here are the things i like about engarde better than fencing time:

You can add someone to the pools after you have created them and printed the pool sheets. Say you forget to check someone in, you can just throw them in the appropriate pool without having to recreate all the pools from scratch.

This is a tough problem. I wanted to do something like this in Fencing Time, but the problem is that just dropping someone in can mess up the seeding. It actually isn't too hard to recreate the pools if you need to add someone. But I'll see if there's any way I can add someone on the fly.

I like being able to see the reports before I print them, I look at them during the even for all kinds of reasons, and Fencing Time just wants to dump them to the printer.

Adding a print preview of the reports should be fairly easy.

Imputting the pool results in Engarde is much easier, you just have to hit the number of touches scored or a v for a V5 bout, you don't have to hit tab after each bout, you can just use the arrow keys to navigate around the pool if trying to get to a particular bout.

I'll look into doing this too - I agree that would make entering scores easier. The complication is that the pool sheet can also be used for team events, where scores can be double-digits... but I should be able to make that work.

I like the fact that engarde catches you if you enter something wrong. I.e. this past weekend I had a pool sheet that was messed up, both boxes of one bout had both competitors losing, one said 3 the other said 2. Fencing time just assumes that the person with three touches won, whereas engarde alerts you to the fact that you dont have a person winning, entering the score with less than five touches is easy, you just click the 'victory with score button'.

We usually check the entered scores by making sure the indicators computed on the signed pool sheet match what FT computes. Otherwise, I think it's valid for FT to assume the larger score is the winner, even if it isn't 5.

Not that its highly useful, but i like the 'auto complete pools' button in engarde

What does that button do?

I like the fact that engarde alerts you visibly when you have entered all the pools, you don't sit around waiting for the last pool that hasnt come in, when they've all come in. It also gives you a nice screen telling you what pools/de bouts you are waiting on, fencing time lacks this. Its really nice when you can see who is running behind, wether it is a pool or a quadrant of a de tableaux

In FT, when all pools are in, the "Start Next Round" button becomes active... It would be an easy change to make it change color or do something more obvious.

As for a list of what DE bouts are being waited on, I already have plans to add this in the new version... I agree that it's a handy feature.

The interface for entering the DE Bouts in engarde is much cleaner. Over all, there is less mouse work required to complete a task in engarde, most of it is covered with an alt key, and one letter, i do not have to click anywhere when I am running a tournament in engarde, and it makes things go much faster... you can do this with fencing time also, but you have to tab everywhere... example, when entering de bouts, each bout in engarde has a code, there is a letter which corresponds to which table it is in (A is gold medal bout, B is round of 4, etc...) and a corresponding number 1 is the bout on the top of the page, 2 is the next one, etc. It makes imput much easier.

I am going to be making several changes which should make entering DE bouts a lot easier... right now there's just too much scrolling necessary to find the bouts on large tableaus.

I like that engarde demands less system resources than Fencing time does. It also takes up less screen real estate, making it easier to navigate.

I can't do much about that... since I'm using Microsoft .NET technology for development, that incurs a certain amount of overhead. FT actually doesn't use much in the way of resources according to my profiler, most of the memory is .NET overhead.

One of the strongest points of engarde over fencing time is the ability to go back and change things. There is much more flexibility in general with everything that engarde does, and I like that, I like being able to make the decisions as opposed to having the program make them for me.

I tried to make FT very flexible in this regard, although there are limits as to what you can go back and change. Just about every decision FT makes can be overridden by unchecking one of the option checkboxes. If you wanted to do everything manually, FT will let you do so.

I love the fact that Engarde makes HTML files of pool results, ranking after pools, and DE tableaux, and final results, without having to do anything, two keyboard commands and you have html files ready to post. I don't know if Fencing Time does this or not.

FT only does HTML final results. I didn't realize there was a demand for HTML output of anything else, but I'll look into adding that.

Oh yeah... and engarde is free... it doesn't cost $50.

Yes, but Fencing Time is in English!

Things I don't like about engarde:

It doesn't handle USFA ratings.
<snip>

Obviously you need to do the classifications awarded by hand after the tournament, but I have the chart almost memorized by now, and it takes 2 minutes.

Another thing I don't like:
The high seed doesn't automatically end up in the large pool. The FIE doesn't do this, so it doesn't automatically do it. Most of the time it works out ok, but ocassionally you have to shift some one into the high-seed's pool. Again, a two minute prospect

All in all, I like engarde the best.

NB: Engarde is the software the FIE uses to run the world cups.

When I started writing FT, I looked at all of the other software out there so that I could pull the best elements of each into Fencing Time. With Engarde, I couldn't get past the fact that it's in French (unless there's an English version that I missed).

My goal was to make a piece of software that was easy to use and fully functional for 90% of the tournaments out there. I was not concerned with big national events, but rather, local club-run tournaments. I think that FT fits that niche well... the fact that we have one of our "fencing moms" entering scores and printing out all the forms tells me that it indeed turned out easy to use!

I think FT offers numerous advantages over all of the other software. Aside from its ease-of-use, I think it's very flexible, the integration with askfred.net is very handy, and as far as I can tell, it's the only software that is still being maintained. Over the past year I've added numerous requested features and I'm continuing to do so.

You might want to give Fencing Time another try... especially this fall after I integrate some of the features that you would like to see. You can get the latest version at www.fencingtime.com.

Dan

[Craig]

There is an english language pack for enguard:
http://www.fie.ch/utilitaires/logici...ux/Anglais.zip

Craig

[DJ Apostrophe]

Dan,
Thanks for taking the time to respond. I really appreciate it.

The reason I like adding someone on the fly is at events like E& unders and Unclassified, tournaments where the newbie fencer is more likely to compete. Many times I have had people show up right after I had sent the pools out or closed registration. With these tournaments their rating generally doesn't have much effect on seeding, and since it is all randomized anyway, the pools wouldn't come out the same if i were to recreate them. So to keep the hassle and nastyness down, i can just throw them into one of the smaller pools and let it run on. I have used this feature many times and I now think it is indespensible.

Adding the print preview to the reports would be extremly helpful.

Engarde has an option under the format of the competition to adjust the number of hits in the pools. You can use it with any number of touches in the pools, and you can move around so if you have 10+ touches in pool bouts, you can then hop to the next box with the tab key or the right arrow button, and the V automatically pops you to the next box... i just enjoy how it works.

The scores thing i believe is just a personal preference thing. engarde requires you to explicitly state who won each bout, and I like that, one more method of error control.

That button just randomly completes the pool sheets... most useful while training people how to use the software.

I agree with the scrolling. That is one of the things that turned me off of fencing time.

As for system resources, I'm running the software on my laptop which has a 333Mhz processor with 128MB of ram and fencing time just seems a little sluggish on my machine.

If you look at the newengland division site http://www.neusfa.org and go to the schedule/results section, you will see how we have been posting the results. We have recieved a TON of positive feedback on this.

Engarde is also available in english. The link that Craig posted gets you the British English version. Adam Blake did a lot of work to translate the British English into American English, as well as make some of the fields make more sense for the average american. What he has done is available here http://www.prisedefer.com/engarde He has also created a draft of a wonderful manual that is extremly helpful. He is currently working another version of it

We have used Engarde for everything from a four person Y10 division championships to a 95 person Foil Open (last year's pomme de terre), its nice to only have one program for people to learn.

We too have trained fencing parents and there are quite a few who help us out with the software all the time. Engarde is not difficult to use and is highly efficient.

I would like to try fencing time again, but I don't likethe crippled version that is available to use for trial. It makes it difficult for me to evaluate how it can handle all kinds of whacky formats and team events and such. Engarde is working now, and we have quite a few people who enjoy using it so I can not see the division changing.

Thank you again for responding to my post.

-w

[dberke]

DJ',

Thanks for the response... your comments are great and really show some areas where I can make improvements to Fencing Time.

Originally posted by DJ Apostrophe
Dan,
Thanks for taking the time to respond. I really appreciate it.

The reason I like adding someone on the fly is at events like E& unders and Unclassified, tournaments where the newbie fencer is more likely to compete. Many times I have had people show up right after I had sent the pools out or closed registration. With these tournaments their rating generally doesn't have much effect on seeding, and since it is all randomized anyway, the pools wouldn't come out the same if i were to recreate them. So to keep the hassle and nastyness down, i can just throw them into one of the smaller pools and let it run on. I have used this feature many times and I now think it is indespensible.

I agree, this really would be a nice feature. I will look into how I can accomplish this without causing problems for the seeding algorithm.

I agree with the scrolling. That is one of the things that turned me off of fencing time.

I'm going to be adding a feature which I'm tentatively calling the "Quick Bout Window", which will list the bouts that available to be fenced. It will also be an alternate location for the display of the 10:00 timers showing how long before the bouts can be fenced. Clicking on the bouts in this window will jump the tableau to bout, where the results can be entered.

As for system resources, I'm running the software on my laptop which has a 333Mhz processor with 128MB of ram and fencing time just seems a little sluggish on my machine.

Yup... while .NET only "requires" a 90 MHz CPU to run, in typical Microsoft style, it really requires a machine more like a P3-533 to run well. Most .NET applications ran sluggishly on my machine (before I upgrade to a faster system).

If you look at the newengland division site http://www.neusfa.org and go to the schedule/results section, you will see how we have been posting the results. We have recieved a TON of positive feedback on this.

I checked out the site and I agree that it's cool to see the pool & DE results. It shouldn't be very hard to export that data from Fencing Time.

Engarde is also available in english. The link that Craig posted gets you the British English version. Adam Blake did a lot of work to translate the British English into American English, as well as make some of the fields make more sense for the average american. What he has done is available here http://www.prisedefer.com/engarde He has also created a draft of a wonderful manual that is extremly helpful. He is currently working another version of it

We have used Engarde for everything from a four person Y10 division championships to a 95 person Foil Open (last year's pomme de terre), its nice to only have one program for people to learn.

We too have trained fencing parents and there are quite a few who help us out with the software all the time. Engarde is not difficult to use and is highly efficient.

I apparently had an old version - my search turned up an old Dos program. I've downloaded the latest version and played around with it a bit.

I get the impression that the learning curve for Engarde is a bit steep - especially without the English documentation! While it does look like a capable program, I think the user interface is unnecessarily complicated. (I'm a stickler for easy-to-use interfaces - I have a background in UI design and I cringe when I see things presented poorly.) I imagine that once you've gotten used to it it's not hard, but I don't find it very intuitive. That's one area where I think Fencing Time really excels - the UI is very intuitive and it's farily simple to figure out without any guidance.

I would like to try fencing time again, but I don't likethe crippled version that is available to use for trial. It makes it difficult for me to evaluate how it can handle all kinds of whacky formats and team events and such. Engarde is working now, and we have quite a few people who enjoy using it so I can not see the division changing.

Thank you again for responding to my post.

-w

I had to compromise and limit the trial version - since I wasn't giving the software away for free, I needed to limit it somehow. I limited it to simple pools+DE formats with a maximum of 16 fencers because I felt that's a good tradeoff. Plus, small clubs that run infrequent tournaments would probably would have no more than 16 fencers competing. That way, they essentially could use the software for free, while bigger clubs that run larger tournaments would need to pay the $50.

Thanks again for the input ... I wish you had been in on the Fencing Time beta!

Dan

[Dee EffEll]

Originally posted by Craig
There is an english language pack for enguard:
http://www.fie.ch/utilitaires/logici...ux/Anglais.zip

Craig

Hmmm....would that be "On Guard?"

[epeemike81]

Ah, yes... the oldest debate in software!

it sounds like what we are saying is that Fencing Time concentrates on ease of use, while Engarde offers the type of high level control that systems guys like to have. Being systems guys, is it any wonder that Adam, Wayne, and I all like Engarde best??

I point to the example of adding somebody to pools without reseeding. Fencing Time won't allow it, as it can screw up the seeding. Engarde trusts the tournament organizers to know whether it screws the seeding or not.

Its kinda the difference between Word and WordPerfect: The former trusts the user less (which may or may not be a good thing).

-m