What are the reasons behind choosing a particular option?

When should I choose random pairings?
When should I make seatings by standings?

I recall that previously, pairing by standings was default while now, WER defaults to random pairings.

random seating is useful for competitive seal deck. I want players to be seat randomly. So, players who sit beside are not their close friends. If they are close friends maybe they exchange cards or give an strategic advise during construct their decks. random seating can mitigate this risk.

seating by players are useful for collecting the decklist. decklist are sorted by lastname. more useful for competitive constructed tournament.

For prerelease, I seat by name but let players construct their deck with his friend after I made tournament announcement. I hope they are not exchange cards. :D

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for pairing,

default is random pairing. it useful for round x-1 or x-2 (x is the number of rounds in tournament) sometime players just pretend to play and wait until they know match outcome of that nearby table. random tables force player to start play without information from beside table.

seating by standing is useful when you have judges to cover the floor area and can listen player talking during x, x-1, x-2 rounds. :D

A major benefit for seat by standings is that players may catch that
they're results are entered incorrectly.

On Sun Jan 27 15:07, Petr Hudecek wrote:
> What are the reasons behind choosing a particular option?
>
> When should I choose random pairings?
> When should I make seatings by standings?

The only time I feel you should definitely do one or the other is if you have a
split venue. If you seat by standings then most people will stay in the same
room from one round to the next, which really helps your between-round logistics.

Other than that I don't think it matters too much. Players (or, at least, me
when I'm playing) prefer seating by standing. It's nice to know you're doing
well by moving up when you win. From a judges' perspective having all the top
tables together in the last round allows you to spot any collusion / bribary
more easily, but on the other hand it also allows players to look at which
other tables are drawing / playing when making their decision whether to ID.
I'm not sure which of these is more desirable.

Matt

On Mon, Jan 28, 2013 at 9:25 PM, Matthew Johnson
<forum-2688@apps.magicjudges.org> wrote:
> I'm not sure which of these is more desirable.

I am, one of them is legal and ok. The other is cheating and a very
bad thing. Trying to catch the cheaters is good.

I normally do by standings throughout, with occasional use of random tables in the last round if I am well-staffed. Otherwise I will do by standings in the last round as well, to keep the tables with high problem potential in the one place.