I typically see intentional draws in chess usually carried out more like 6-8 moves-probably to give it some credibility. Play a well-known variation of an opening and call it a draw. Playing only 2 moves is a little extreme and obviously reveals the intent, but is still permissible if both players agree.
In chess, there is no rule that one must play for a win. But because of the various issues with repeated draws, for many years there have been proposals to eliminate draws in chess or at least remove the 1/2-1/2 result. Nothing has officially stuck yet.
Yes, I originally used 50 players in my draft, but then I decided to make it 100 so that I didnât have to cut 25 in half and get into managing that for round two. I didnât bother to redo the round count. Nice catch.
And re Bowen, yes, Pinburgh is âmodified Swissâ with staggered tiering; much better in their situation than pure would be. The current Pinburgh scale worked well, and looks good from a theoretical perspective. Iâd stick with it for 2017 at least.
Of course, one reason that never stuck is that you can easily have a situation where no win is possible, i.e. neither player has enough material left to force checkmate. And if there was a rule that said, âplay until someone wins or itâs a guaranteed draw,â they can always âexchange downâ to a draw. The âagreed drawâ 'saves time, but I still didnât like it when I saw people doing it before, say, move 20.
This is exactly what we are thinking of doing, which we did last year with great success, everyone seemed to have a good time. Also in the end, as long as you play above average every round you will most probably advance to playoff.
Pinburgh will reseed players with the same number of wins (I forget if itâs random or if thereâs a formula) and then itâs slaughter pairing within each tier (if I remember correctly).
MatchPlay has so many options that I forgot a âswissâ style option when I was describing player pairings. Letâs amend this:
In group play you can also choose âtiered swissâ as the pairing option. This works like Pinburgh with tiers that become more narrow as the tournament progresses. Within each tier players are randomized (if I recall correctly). Tiered swiss is only available with a specific set of rounds (3, 4, 5, 10, 12 or 13 rounds). No attempts are made to give players opponents they havenât faced before.
From playing in many Magic: The Gathering tournaments that all run under the âswissâ format, I can maybe give a little bit of insight on what âswissâ format is⌠and why I personally think itâs just as fair as any system can be, given that there is not enough time for a full round robin.
Itâs for head to head matches in which each roundâs pairings are determined by the current standings. The thing that makes it fair though, is, when cutting to a top 8, people with the same record will have their tie breaker determined by strength of field (their opponents average win %). That way, not only is your record taken into account, but also how hard your opponents were. Thus someone who won their first 6 rounds, but then lost in the final two rounds (in an eight round tournament) would place higher than someone who lost their first two rounds, and then won the remaining 6, since in the last two rounds the first person was playing other 6-0 opponents (who were probably very good).
The only downside is, it can be impossible to recover from a bad start, as it sort of snowballs on itself.
One other key point: forget all the math and fairness questions. Iâve received much more positive feedback on Swiss style or round robin events being more fun and enjoyable than elimination style events (especially bracket, and to a lesser extent, X strikes). People tend to have more fun knowing they get to keep playing.
Except a chess match does not provide 2 results, it provides 3. Which is why the big match-ups occur prior to the final round and the final round is often anticlimactic.
Hence the invention of the term âswiss gambitâ in chess where a top player draws their first match and remains on a slightly lower trajectory for many rounds, overtaking the leaders after they have played a much harder schedule. (This is slightly tongue in cheek, but the term exists).
Our âthe winner get to pick next systemâ competition kept every other month in Stockholm has featured swiss on some occasions. (and some totally wicked qualification systems on other).
I allways thought the key to making swiss fair is to have enough rounds in qualification? You can allways debate its harder for some and easier for some but with SOS and SOSOS ( I could be wrong on the amounts of S in that) and enough rounds I have not heard any complaints. More that people think its more fun to be matched against people of equal skill/form on the day.
We have used both a free chess software and matchplay.
Absolutely true, some of the other people organizing knockout tournaments on locations in Oslo have adapted the tiered swiss knockout and people are in general very happy with it. if they lose 3 in a row their last game wont be against one who hasnt lost at all and would hammer in the last nail, so to say.
Thanks for the clarification, we actually decided to go for this for the xmas tournament now, so we all met âhalfwayâ, besides I think it will get exciting because you really should play well throughout the rounds to get to meet the lowest in your tier.
I find the idea of working out how to implement the FIDE system interesting enough that Iâd be interested in doing so, if you have an API I can develop against. It does require the field be seeded (random works too, I guess): does Matchplay know about WPPRs?
You wouldnât need to implement against a Match Play API because the flow would be the other way around: Match Play would be asking your FIDE service for pairings, your FIDE service would not be telling Match Play to generate a new round.
That said, talking to a FIDE external FIDE service over the network would most likely be a non-starter for me. If your service is unavailable people would be see Match Play as the reason their tournament is totally broken.
So any FIDE implementation I can use would have to be written as a library I can include in the Match Play code base (that also means the implementation has to be in PHP or mayyyyyyyybe node.js with a CLI but thatâs a big maybe)
We used Matchplay to run a group Swiss pairing tourney with Ifpa scoring. We did 5 rounds of 4 games each.No finals. 38 players. Everyone really liked the Swiss grouping. The only complaints I heard was with Ifpa scoring there was too large of a points spread in a single round. 28-4=24 point spread. So we are running a similar tourney in a few weeks with 6 rounds of 3 games each. So 21-3=18 point spread in a single round. I think the Swiss component of this format is the best part of it.
swiss system shows very good the top and the bottom of the ranking, but not between.
Thereâs a formula to determine the number of rounds that you should play dependent on the number of finalists you want
r = 0.2 x p + 1.4 x f
r: number of rounds
p: number of participants
f: number of finalists
