Life In 19x19

The British Go Association has a tournament director's handbook, which provides a lot of good information on how to run a tournament. The Scottish Open this year threw up a bit of a gap in its advice - what do you do when you have a really small number of players...? (I mention this, not because I heard people crying about the tournament, but because it seems like an interesting problem to solve.)

They had just 9 players in total (pretty unusual) and had planned 5 rounds. What do you do as a TD when you find yourself in that situation? To my mind there are 3 options.
1 - Just go ahead and run a McMahon anyway
2 - Run a Handicap Swiss
3 - Make it a McMahon, but allow handicaps 'across the bar' (This is not allowed according to BGA directives)

There are a lot of factors to take into consideration.
1 - You advertised a McMahon tournament, people may complain if they turn up and find that's not what they get
2 - Your McMahon bar is really hard to set. The tournament went for 8 people above the bar, I'd have said that the "can you possibly win test" suggested 3 people above the bar. Both of which lead to big mis-matches (i.e. 1 way street games)
3 - Some people really don't like handicap games in a tournament, as they aren't real games of Go.
4 - Allowing handicaps across the bar, means you have to think harder about your tiebreaker validity. Many people would argue SOS should be including handicaps... but this is super noisy.

Fortunately, you have a small group of people to discuss the question with.

Going way back, 60 years or so ago, the Swiss system for tournaments was designed to handle deciding the winner when there is a large number of players with relatively few rounds. It was never intended to work with a small number of players. As far as I know the usual solution to this problem is to have a handicap tournament, no "bar". The first round pairings are determined at random and thereafter players are matched according to score. Another approach might be to break the field into two groups of reasonably closely ranked players and have two round-robin handicap tournaments. Lesson for planners: all specifications of tournament type are subject to change at the tournament director's discretion.

The only bar that should really interest nine go players who have shown up for a tournament is the one to which they retire for the afternoon games.