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tsh: tournament shell

tsh is Scrabble tournament management software: it is used by Scrabble tournament directors to keep track of their players; decide who is playing whom, where and when (using almost every different pairing system I have heard of); enter results of games; report on standings, statistics and prizes; adjudicate word challenges; maintain event web sites, and submit results to rating authorities. It is the leader in its field, and is used to run the World Championship, several National Championships (including ones in the U.S., Canada, the U.K. and Pakistan), the King’s Cup in Bangkok, a third of rated events of all sizes in North America, and virtually all events in many countries (including the U.K.).

tsh is a platform-independent Perl application. It is developed using OS/X on a MacBook, but tested regularly with Windows, and it has users from the Mac, Windows and Linux communities. Its input is primarily command-line oriented for speed (experienced data entry staff can enter more than 15 games per minute), with customizable web-based output for printing reports and automatic upload to an event website. Some web-based data entry and editing tools are also available. tsh was originally written for an English-speaking user base, but includes varying degrees of user-contributed support for German, Norwegian and Polish.

tsh is open source software: it comes with all of its source for you to tinker with (but not redistribute), and there is no charge for its use. If you feel moved to make a PayPal donation, you can do so at poslfit.com, but please consider doing so first to other free Scrabble-related software you may be using, such as Quackle or cross-tables.com, not to mention any number of more worthy charitable causes.

I wrote the first version of tsh in 1999, when I decided I was tired of doing Swiss pairings by hand. The oldest version I still have dates back to 2001 and is about 1,400 lines of code. The current version of tsh is numbered 3.330 and the tsh distribution ZIP archive is available as a free (1.8 Mb) download. It currently has about 70,000 lines of code. The version number is incremented a few times a year, when significant changes have been made and reasonably well tested. The next version will be 3.340, portions of which are available in a testing ZIP archive or through the built-in update command. Unsupported older versions can be found in an archive directory. If you would like tsh to do something that it does not already do, please send me email; that’s how almost all of its features have started. If you'd like to find out more, the tsh manual is available at this web site, and it is also included in the distribution. If you are not an expert user, you will in particular need to read the installation instructions before you get started. You may also join the tsh-users mailing list to stay informed about what’s new with tsh, request new features and discuss tsh with fellow users.

To see what’s new in tsh, please take a look at its change log.

If you want to use the program, I will do everything that I can to support you. If you give me enough lead time, I'll help you set it up on your computer, and set up the configuration files. If you want to set it up yourself, please read carefully the manual section on configuring tsh. As long as I am not unreachable while travelling, I encourage you to call me for immediate technical support while planning or running your event. I can also be reached via Skype, Gmail Chat, AIM or Facebook Chat.

John Chew
poslfit@gmail.com
+1 416 876 7675