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Swiss Tournament
    Keywords: Tournament

A Swiss Tournament is a tournament in which players are paired with other players who are on the same score (or as near as is possible), while avoiding pairing players who have played each other earlier in the tournament. Although Swiss Tournaments are primarily associated with chess, they are also used for a number of amateur go tournaments, notably the World Amateur Go Championship.

The final ranking of all players in a Swiss Tournament is usually build using the following criteria:

  1. number of wins (called "score", but not to be confused with the scores of the games)
  2. additional tie breaker

In order to make the pairings as fair as possible, the pairing rules can become quite complicated (see, for example, the [ext] FIDE Swiss Rules). Because of this, the pairings are nowadays usually done by computer. Many programs are available to do this, and in particular any program that can handle the McMahon system should be able to handle the Swiss system, since it is really just a special case.

The Swiss system is so called because it originated in Switzerland: the first person to suggest the system appears to have been a Swiss citizen named Julius Müller (not to be confused with the German theologian of the same name), and the first chess tournament run under this system took place in Zürich in 1895.


wms: I added the original note to the "number of wins" bit; it was the edited to make the wording clearer, and used "margins" to refer to the scores of the games. I agree with the wording changes, it is better than my version, but using "margins", while correct, is very uncommon usage, so I changed that back to "scores of games". If people really think that margins is better here, change it back and I won't touch it again!

Robert Pauli:

  • I used "margin" without much thought - like your change, wms.
  • a Swiss tournament is one held in Switzerland, a Swiss Tournament is one using the Swiss system (me nitpicking again ;-)


This is a copy of the living page "Swiss Tournament" at Sensei's Library.
(OC) 2004 the Authors, published under the OpenContent License V1.0.