Can Swiss Manager be "fixed"?

Ref: Here.

From the evidence of the Swiss Manager file that has been sent to me, it shows that you can manually over ride any pairing in any round. And I have been told this is fairly common in the last 2 rounds with the collusion of the Arbiter and/or Tournament Director. That is a very strong assertion.

And it seems that if say you forced pair 2 weak players at R1 you would probably have at least one player at R2 that really doesn't deserve that one point since usually strong players are paired against weak players on the first round. This can be manipulated to give easy point/passage to a 2nd round player.

This is one possible use of a high rated players paired as unrated. The guy from India was accused by a Malaysian player that he was actually a 2200. So he can be used to ambush someone in the first round especially if the unrated players are not entered in an alphabetical order. Of course once inserted into the system falsely he can do random damage all along the way. I am not quite sure here but maybe there is a use for him also in the later rounds. But that is already bad enough if it can take place.

The more damning assertions are that even those at the last 2 rounds can be forced paired together without anyone noticing if they are the same points or a floater from below. Say an odd player half a point below and he can be used to pair against someone at the next level.

Maybe I am not explaining this too clearly but I think that with Hamid's boast and the players complaint, the Datmo individual rapid deserves an independent audit.

Note: I did inform the player from Malaysia who is a known strong player that he should make a formal complaint but he said he felt it was the organisers responsibility. I think he has a point.

It should be fairly easy to audit this. Apart from the administrative issue of checking for false unrated players and keeping to strict alphabetical order when entering into the system, just run the program again as it was done at Datmo individual rapid using the same parameters and tie breaks. Then just run it for 11 rounds. It should show up if there was any manipulation. Thats what I think.

Hamid's boast as well as the players complaint should be enough grounds to do this for the sake of the Tournaments reputation. It would help to clear the air and exonerate our esteemed IA's and FA's.

This will be good for Chess as a whole. That is again just my opinion. As an International event attracting many foreign players to our Country, we need some due diligence at least to ensure that they are spending their money on and giving support to a clean tournament.