Improving Ranking Quality and Fairness in Swiss-System Chess Tournaments

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. The full version [3] of this extended abstract can be found here: https://arxiv.org/abs/2112.10522. CCS Concepts: • Theory of computation → Algorithmic mechanism design.

Optimization methods and algorithms

“…Various tournament designs were compared by simulations by Sziklai et al (2022), where the Swiss tournament was found to be the best in approximating the real power rankings. The Swiss systems are also the most popular design in chess tournaments, these were analysed by Führlich et al (2022). A fair scheduling problem for The International Young Physicists' Tournament was solved with optimisation techniques by Cechlárová et al (2023).…”

Strategic Decision-Making in Swiss-System Chess Tournaments

“…Chess competitions, with their strategic complexity and intense competition, provide a rich field for studying the decision-making processes of players. The Swiss-system tournament format is widely employed in competitive games, including most e-sports, badminton, and chess-the focus of this paper [1,2]. This involves two-player zero-sum games and Nash equilibrium [3,4].…”