Every tournament organiser likes to have things ready for the tournament before it starts. Therefore, it is normal to have a facility to register players in advance. Tournament settings are also normally known in advance. We should publish the Tiebreakers to be used in advance. We should advertise if there is to be an Upper Bar, a LowerBar/Rating Floor., handicap above the bar, blah blah blah.

Therefore in normal usage of this program I expect that you would create a directory in advance with a settings file and a players file, then slowly add in players as they preregister. Now, we don't want to continually download the European Go Database history file. The alternative is to just update the ratings of the registered players. We don't really care if their grades, clubs, or country data change. To do so you can make use of the refresh option. This queries the EGD by PIN and we update the player file with the returned rating string.

If your player doesn't exist in the EGD, just provide a fake PIN. All EGD pins are 8 digits. So please provide a 6 or 7 digit fake PIN. This ensures you don't overwrite the rating of a new player with the rating of an existing player.