Tournament & Ratings Software

The software available for download below is being used successfully in Australia, South Africa, Malta, Nigeria, Malaysia and Singapore. For further advice about this software, contact the maintainer of the SOWPODS website by email

Tournament Software

To download the programme, AU424.EXE, which caters for standard tournaments, round robins and teams events, click here. Apart from pairing players in each round, the programme also determines who starts, assigns table numbers, arranges players in table number sequence of tournament position, and enables the user to change delete or add a player after names have been entered.

For a set of instructions on how to use the programme, au424.exe, click here. Note that instructions for how to run ratings directly after a tournament, provided ratings files are on hand, are included.

The current version being used in Australia is AU438.exe, which is now the recommended one

The resultant *.tou file is also suitable for inputting into Ratings software for the purpose of calculating player ratings(see ratings program below).

To download LOOK.ZIP containing the look-up programme, LOOK.EXE and the dictionary file, SOWPODS4.DSQ, suitable for computer adjudication of words up to 9 letters long, click here. The programme can also be adapted for US and UK word sources, and can be adapted to print a slip showing the result of the challenge.

If you just want to download the latest dictionary file, SOWPODS4.DSQ, incorporating changes caused by OSW4, click here. This should replace REDWOOD.DSQ in your current look directory.

To download a special programme, TOUSPLIT.EXE, for splitting tournament files produced by the Swiss Programme, click here. This programme is useful in instances where one player substitutes for another mid-tournament, or when a player withdraws from a tournament. For a general procedure for substitutions and withdrawals, click here.

Ratings Software

To download the Ratings programme, RATINGS.EXE, for calculating ratings based on tournament files created by the Swiss programme, click here. This program must be run in a Windows 95 DOS window.

To download an empty RATING.DAT file, containing the header only, click here. This will download as a text file into your browser. The fields within each rating.dat record are:

Nickname: 4 characters (as derived in Swiss Programme)
Space
State: 3 characters (use OS=Overseas outside Australia
Space
Name: 20 characters
Space
Number of games played: 4 characters
Space
Rating: 4 characters
Space
Date in format 19yymmdd (8 characters)