Swiss Pairing

    Keywords: Tournament

A tournament run with Swiss Pairing is one 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 McMahon Pairing should be able to handle Swiss Pairing - since the latter really just is 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.


This is a copy of the living page "Swiss Pairing" at Sensei's Library.
(OC) 2005 the Authors, published under the OpenContent License V1.0.
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