Improving ranking quality and fairness in Swiss-system chess tournaments

Sauer Pascal, Cseh Ágnes () and Lenzner Pascal
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Sauer Pascal: Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, Potsdam, Germany
Cseh Ágnes: Institute of Economics, HUN-REN Centre for Economic and Regional Studies, Budapest, Hungary
Lenzner Pascal: Hasso Plattner Institute, University of Potsdam, Potsdam, Germany

Journal of Quantitative Analysis in Sports, 2024, vol. 20, issue 2, 127-146

Abstract: The International Chess Federation (FIDE) imposes a voluminous and complex set of player pairing criteria in Swiss-system chess tournaments and endorses computer programs that are able to calculate the prescribed pairings. The purpose of these formalities is to ensure that players are paired fairly during the tournament and that the final ranking corresponds to the players’ true strength order. We contest the official FIDE player pairing routine by presenting alternative pairing rules. These can be enforced by computing maximum weight matchings in a carefully designed graph. We demonstrate by extensive experiments that a tournament format using our mechanism (1) yields fairer pairings in the rounds of the tournament and (2) produces a final ranking that reflects the players’ true strengths better than the state-of-the-art FIDE pairing system.

Keywords: swiss system; tournaments; fairness; ranking; matching; chess (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
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DOI: 10.1515/jqas-2022-0090

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