Tournament Types

Round Robin (AKA “All-play-all”)

Used at the top level for competitions with a fixed pool of players N players => n - 1 rounds. You want an even number of players, otherwise the highest number is a bye (i.e. everyone gets a bye at least once!) Double round robin (e.g. if you played white one tournament, you get to play black the other tournament) Everyone draws a number from a hat (effectively) and gets a number. Often used for blitz tournaments

Knock-out

Not very popular (every round half of the people playing go home!)

Matches

Player A plays against player B. Nice an simple. In individual matches, they may play each other multiple times

Scheveningen System

A team event system. Teams are up against each other in pairs and it’s effectively a round robin then - everyone in team A plays everyone in team B. Works for many teams. E.g. 4 teams of 3 players = 9 rounds (For example, player A1 plays A1 -> B1, B2, B3; A1 -> C1, C2, C3; A1 -> D1, D2, D3)

Swiss System

• Reproducible (always makes the same result)
• Can support (n) rounds, where (2^n) is the number of players:
  • 3 rounds supports up to 8 players
  • 4 rounds supports up to 16 players
  • 5 rounds supports up to 32 players
  • etc.
• Dutch System (FIDE Swiss): Pairs top to bottom
• Lim System: Works towards the middle from top and bottom
• Dubov System:
• Accelerated Swiss: When doing the first round pairing, you assume round 0 has taken place and award the top half players 1 point. At the end, you remove the additional points that we gave. The idea is that we boost the top half (which is where the winner is likely to be) so we get to the result much much faster.
• Pairings are arranged by score group, so people play people with the same score