How Were players paired back in the days before WinTD, Swisssys and other softwares?

Being born, in 2009, my entire life was computers pairing players against each other. But that gave me a question: how were tournaments paired before thoses softwares, and how long did it take? Did they randomly draw players or something else?

I think they did swiss pairing by hand. in a field of 20 players the 10 ten would play the bottom ten first round. 1vs 11, 2 vs 12, 3 vs 13 and so on

By hand with cards. To make Local TD status, you have to be able to pair by hand and several such pairing problems are on the test.

Tournament directors used pairing cards, one card for each player, showing their name, rating and their pairings for each round (including what color they played and when they were paid outside their scoregroup. TDs knew the pairing rules. Smart TDs now learn the pairing rules so they can second guess the pairing software if needed. It did take a little longer to make the pairings, but a skilled TD could still do them quite quickly.

The pairing TD(s) spent the bulk of the time working on manual pairing cards. A good pairing TD would be doing partial pairings as enough score groups finished. The final manual pairings would be finished about as quickly using a pairing program would today. The big differences are that the pairing TD would often not have time to work the tournament floor and a last minute withdrawal would require either a complete repairing or a ladder repairing (a last minute withdrawal is a minor issue if the pairing program has not yet generated pairings).

Some dinosaur directors still pair using pairing cards even in 2025.

Played last night in a club event. The elder statesman TD in the club still uses cards and he's almost as quick with them than I am with WinTD

Just in case you didn't catch it from Spock, to make local TD you still need to be able to pair by hand. I have a friend whose computer died during a tournament last year so he transitioned to cards and did the pairings that way.

Making Local TD is just barely possible without knowing how to pair, but you have to do very well on the rest of the test questions. Knowing how to pair is, however, something a decent Local TD needs.

I’ve been seeing more and more of these question about “how did we do this or that?”. I guess tech advanced so fast and changed life so fast, over the course of 20 years, that it left kids, anyone who became cognizant after 2007, in a world so completely changed they couldn’t imagine the world just a few years prior. I feel like butter churning and scythe mowing etc must’ve taken way longer to be completely replaced and the collective memories of these activities seem to last longer in our consciousness, perhaps as a result of the slow pace of change.

I started being a TD back in the pairing card days. You get very fast at it. It's a helpful skill because I can look at a pairing chart in a tournament I'm playing at and guess the next round pairings pretty well.

More important is being able to look at the pairings that were generated and realizing the settings are not what they should be and you need to change them and re-pair.

It also helps when a GM questions the pairings. If you say "the computer did it" that won't fly because setting errors happen. If you explain hot the rules drive the pairing then the GM is much more likely to accept it (they've never argued when I've explained it).