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Does anyone know of a (free) program which could be used to organize a bughouse chess tournament?

Where in each round the partner you have would change. (With the basic idea to put a good and 'less good' player in the same team.) The good player would be defined as the one with the most bughouse team wins.

Or how should I try to manage such a tournament? Any ideas?

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There is no pairing program which can do what you want. No program exists to change the partners every round according to the previous results. Pairing programs also try and avoid pairing players or teams which have played before.

Exactly how the partners would vary and how you would decide who had played whom is not clearly defined in your system. Your idea needs more work.

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Bughouse is not the only partnered game where this would be a problem worth solving.

Here is a description of what you want for Euchre tournaments; in this case they call it a "progressive" tournament format (not sure why). It still involves manually tracking results (no software) though. If you really must have software you might have to do some more googling.

Just remember that if it works for something like euchre, it will work for bughouse also.

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  • Although it is possible to use it for bughouse, I can't say I like the method in the link. It bills itself as round-robin, but it's really not. People who keep winning (or losing) will never play others who keep winning (or losing). If you have 32 players, you could play 99 rounds and still have eight people with perfect scores and eight people with zeros. And the fact that you only move one table (at most) means that those who alternate wins and losses will play with the same people over and over.
    – D M
    Commented Aug 1, 2019 at 4:26
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Curiously I never thought this dilema would be on the web. I think a software that could alternate partners (so all the players are paired with one another in any given time) would be a nice contribution to the bughouse community. As a small group (12-16) we've come up with a manual "system" that tries to do this even if we have odd numbers playing. Let me show you with a simple example of a 5 player setup:

  • R1: 1-2 ; 3-4 (5 sits out)

    R2: 2-3 ; 4-5 (1 sits out)

    R3: 1-4 ; 3-5 (2 sits out)

    R4: 1-5 ; 2-4 (3 sits out)

    R5: 1-3 ; 2-5 (4 sits out)

We've started using this method with a 'more balanced pairing' in mind. Since all players rotate within the field, fixed 'better couples' is no longer possible. This, in theory, gives more chance to the 'lesser skilled' to have a shot at winning a tournament. In a way, it made it more chess-like since the final scoring became individual an not as a team.

The main issue, which I'm trying to clarify, is that the pairing turns out more complex and cumbersome as the field grows. If you follow the system, you'll see that odd pairings with 7, 11, 15... are the least desirable because 3 participants will be waiting/watching. These scenarios need a programming solution to simplify matters.

As a longtime bughouse enthusiast, I'd like to hear any suggestions as how these parameters should be managed/approached. I hope this gives some light to the original question and ignites an ongoing revealing discussion around this amazing chess variant.

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