There doesn’t seem to be a plethora of chess tournament software on the market. It is ashame, really, since competition makes for better software. As best I can tell, the big money contenders are SwissSys and WinTD. I have never used either of these packages since they cost about $100 each. Instead I discovered a FREE software title called Sevilla. As best I can tell, having never used the others, Sevilla can do all the same ‘tournament’ things as its higher priced brethren. And by ‘tournament’ things I mean setup pairings, keep track of wins/draws/losses and create reports. In fact, it seems to have more pairing options then either of the other two, including an interesting pairing system known as Keizer. (SwissSys can, according to its website, generate report files that you can send to the USCF and cut down on your ratings fees. I would be interested in anyone’s comments regarding this since it seems to be a nice feature.)
I have used Sevilla to run school tournaments and it works exactly as it claims. It can work for team and individual tournaments and has considerably flexible options in scoring and pairings. It also comes with a good help file and templates of various tournaments, like swiss or round robin, which is a nice way to quickly setup a tournament. Finally, Sevilla will calculate ratings and generate reports in text and html for easy web publishing. If you don’t have tournament software, or even if you do, I recommend that you checkout Sevilla at http://www.jbfsoftware.com/ - afterall it is free 
If you do use SwissSys or some other software please let us know its strengths and weaknesses by leaving a comment below.
Until next time…
Tom Fleetwood
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