When something goes wrong at a tournament

Almost any failure at a tournament is solved in five minutes if it was thought about beforehand, and wrecks the evening if it was not. And what wrecks it is not the breakage but the pause: twenty people standing for twenty minutes watching a flustered organizer go home feeling the evening failed - even if the tournament was finished afterwards.

The second rule: one person decides. A committee of five participants in the middle of the hall takes longer than any repair.

The rule for this whole block: tell people immediately. An event cancelled in the morning is accepted calmly; one cancelled an hour beforehand is remembered for a long time.

The most frequent emergency of all, and in both directions it is a five-minute fix - if you know what to change.

• Half as many as expected. Change the system rather than cancelling: with six to ten players a round robin beats a Swiss and everybody plays everybody. Recalculate the number of rounds out loud in front of the room - it reads as a considered decision rather than as panic.
• Twice as many. The problem is tables, not pairings: put two games on a table, shorten the control, and if clocks are short, start games in waves. Turn nobody away - somebody who came and did not play never returns.
• An odd number. A routine situation: somebody receives a bye and a point. Announce the procedure in advance so it does not look arbitrary.
• Latecomers after the pairing is done. Decide in advance whether they enter from round two, and say so at the opening - about lateness.

A prepared answer to «what if twice as many turn up» costs ten minutes of thinking at home and saves an evening - choosing a system.

More on conflicts - etiquette and conduct in the hall, appeals.

A separate category: what broke is not the equipment but your own arithmetic. That is harder, because the organizer is at fault - which makes a calm response more important, not less.

• A wrong pairing. Spotted before the games start - redo it and apologise. After they have started - play on: rearranging games in progress creates more unfairness than it removes.
• The tournament is overrunning. Do the arithmetic at round three, not round five: cut the remaining rounds or the control. Announce it in advance rather than when the venue starts closing.
• More rounds scheduled than possible. In a Swiss with N players you cannot play more than N−1 rounds. Finish early and explain why - that is arithmetic, not failure.
• An error in the standings. Correct it openly and immediately, in front of everyone. A table quietly rewritten damages trust more than the original mistake.

The general principle: an error admitted aloud costs almost nothing; one concealed and then discovered by participants costs the evening its reputation.

All of this fits in one bag and covers most failures:

1. 1Clock batteries - the commonest small failure there is
2. 2One or two spare clocks
3. 3A spare set of pieces, or at least a handful - knights and pawns go missing
4. 4An extension lead
5. 5Paper, pens, tape
6. 6A printed entry list, in case the technology is unavailable
7. 7The venue's phone number and your backup helper's
8. 8A first aid kit, or knowledge of where the venue keeps theirs

What to carry and how to pack it - transporting equipment, logistics of the evening.

• Briefly and out loud. What happened, what you are doing, how long. Three sentences.
• Do not apologise twice. Once is fine; repeated apologies turn a minor hiccup into the event of the evening.
• Do not explain causes in detail. The room does not need to know that a supplier let you down; it needs to know when the round starts.
• Do not ask the room what to do. A vote mid-tournament reads as loss of control, and the decision is yours regardless.
• Name a new time and keep it. «Ten minutes» means starting in ten minutes.

And afterwards: if the disruption was visible, post one short message - what happened and what you will do differently. It costs one message and removes half the impression - about the club chat.