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« on: December 11, 2023, 10:40:44 AM »
The seating algorithm has a "shortcut" for initial seating. That is, instead of going through all of the business of how to balance the tables, which player should move based on location, number of previous moves, distance from the dealer, etc, etc, the seating algorithm takes note that the tournament hasn't yet started and no player has yet been seated. In this case, the algorithm determines how many tables are needed, and how many seats at each table are needed, then goes through them in order, randomly selecting and seating a player. Therefore, the seating ends up "compressed", which means any empty seats are always at the end of the table. It is unfortunate (and probably technically a bug) that the setting When moving players, seat players as close to seat 1 as possible is ignored in this case. Interesting this has never to my knowledge been pointed out.
There are a couple of ways to work around this. The first way would be to automatically seat players as you buy them into the tournament (check the Auto seat checkbox on the Buy-in Players window). When you seat players as they buy-in, the software takes NO balancing whatsoever into consideration, so you get truly random seating. The downside to this method is that you may have to make some adjustments if you don't know exactly how many players will be playing. For example, if you are expecting 24 people and have 3 tables of 8 seats to accommodate them, but only 20 people show up, you could have 8 at one table, 7 at another, and 5 at the third table, which is not balanced. Easy to fix, but you still have to do move some players before the tournament starts.
The second way to do it is more of a hack. If you wait until all players are bought-in to seat them, before you press Seat Players drag a single player to a random table and seat (or right-click on the player in the Unseated Players section and select Randomly seat player at any table). Once one player is placed on a table, press the Seat Players button. This will bypass the "shortcut" and force the seating algorithm into the the usual method of seating/moving players, and will respect the When moving players, seat players as close to seat 1 as possible setting (so make sure to disable that).