“The draw is made on Thursday and nobody sleeps on Wednesday”: an interview with tournament director Nodar Tskhvediani

Georgian Amateur Tour — Stage 3 starts this weekend in Tbilisi. How full is it?

Full, with a waiting list in four events. That is the good problem. The bad problem is that between the draw and the first serve we will lose somewhere between five and ten entries, and every one of them is a person who told us on Thursday that they were definitely coming.

So why publish the order of play two days before play?

Because people travel. Somebody driving from Kutaisi needs to know whether their first match is at nine or at two — that is the difference between leaving at six in the morning and sleeping at home. We would rather publish early and reprint a sheet than keep a hall of players guessing.

What changes next season?

The partner rule, mostly. We already pair single entries in doubles, and from the autumn it is formal: enter alone, and we find you somebody in your grade. The other change is quieter — we are keeping durations for every match now, and after two seasons of that we will finally know how long a grade C draw actually takes instead of guessing.

And the thing that still keeps you up?

Court time. Halls are the constraint in this country, not players. Every time a club opens two more courts, a stage somewhere gets easier to run.