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Free Online Chess ( www.chessmaniac.com) an Online Chess LLC website is now beta testing a new tournament format know as the Swiss System Tournament. A Swiss system tournament is a commonly used type of tournament in chess and other games where players or teams need to be paired to face each other. This type of tournament was first used in a Zurich tournament in 1895, hence the name "Swiss system".

The pairing procedure

The principle of a Swiss tournament is that each player will be pitted against another player who has done as well (or as poorly) as him or herself.

The first round is either drawn at random or seeded according to rating. Players who win receive a point, those who draw receive half a point and losers receive no points. Win, lose or draw, all players proceed to the next round where winners are pitted against winners, losers are pitted against losers and so on. In subsequent rounds, players face opponents with the same (or almost the same) score. No player is paired up against the same opponent twice however. In chess it is also attempted to ensure that each player plays an equal number of games with white and black, alternate colors in each round being the most preferable, and definitely not the same color three times in a row.

The basic rule is that players with the same score are ranked according to rating. Then the top half is paired with the bottom half. For instance, if there are eight players in a score group, number 1 is paired with number 5, number 2 is paired with number 6 and so on. Modifications are then made to balance colors and prevent players from meeting each other twice.

The detailed rules of how to do the pairing are usually quite complicated and often the tournament organizer has access to a computer to do the pairing for him. If the rules are strictly adhered to, the organizer has no discretion in pairing the round. See the link below for detailed pairing rules from FIDE.

The tournament lasts for a number of rounds announced before the tournament (usually between 3 and 9 rounds). After the last round players are ranked by their score, if this is tied a tie break score (such as the sum of all their opponents' scores) or the Buchholz chess rating can be used.

Analysis, advantages and disadvantages

Determining a clear winner (and, incidentally, a clear loser) usually requires the same number of rounds as a knockout tournament, that is the base 2 logarithm of the number of players rounded up. Therefore 3 rounds can handle 8 players, 4 rounds can handle 16 players and so on, however it is not uncommon to have more players than this, and, if the less than the correct number of rounds are played, it can happen that two or more players finish the tournament with a perfect score, having won all their games but never faced each other.

Compared to a knockout tournament the Swiss system has the inherent advantage of not eliminating anyone. That means that a player can enter such a tournament knowing that he will be able to play in all rounds, regardless of how well he does. The worst that can happen in this respect is being the player left over when there is an odd number of players. The player left over receives a bye, meaning he does not play that particular round but receives a full point as if he had won a game. He is reintroduced in the next round and will not receive another bye. A Swiss system tournament does not always end with the exciting climax of the knockout's final however. Sometimes a player may have picked up such a great lead that by the last round he is assured of winning the tournament even if he loses the last game. One fairly common fix for this dilemma is to hold single elimination rounds among the top scorers.

Compared with a round-robin tournament, a Swiss can handle many players without requiring an impractical number of rounds. However the final rankings of a Swiss tournament are usually more random, depending on the tie breakers used. Even though the correct player usually wins, and the correct player usually winds up in last place, the players in between are only sorted roughly without a good tie breaker depth.

Once the beta testing is completed all members will be able to create their very own Swiss System chess tournament.

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Dennis

Site Admin

www.chessmaniac.com

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