What is a Swiss Tournament
A Swiss Style tournament allows all participants to play in each round of a tournament. Unlike Single Elimination Tournaments and Double Elimination Tournaments, no team or players are ever eliminated from the tournament. This is somewhat similar to a Round Robin Tournament, except in a swiss tournament the pairings in subsequent rounds are determined by a player or teams record. The swiss tournament style is very popular in chess, but can be used for just about any sport.

Advantages of a Swiss Tournament

The Swiss Style Tournament can have a set amount of rounds determined before the tournament begins. In a Round Robin tournament every team is scheduled to play every other team in the tournament one time. If you have a large number of teams the round robin can consist entirely of too many games. This would be a good time to try a swiss style tournament, whereas you can limit the number of rounds that will be played, but still have all teams play the same number of games.

Disadvantages of a Swiss Tournament

One major disadvantage of a Swiss Style tournament is the winner of the tournament may have already been determined before the final match-ups are ever played. If the leader of the tournament is undefeated and the next best team has already lost two games, then the final game is irrelevant. This takes away the excitement of a championship game like you would have in a single or double elimination tournament.

Rounds of the Tournament

In the first round of the tournament there are basically two options to set the pairings. If you have had some type of season or preliminary match-ups before the tournament begins, you could seed the pairings accordingly. If not, you could just do a random drawing for the pairings. The idea of a Swiss Style tournament is that each team or player is matched against another team or player who has done as well or not so well as themselves.

In the second round, teams that won in the first round would face off and teams that lost in the first round would face off.

In the third round, teams that are 2-0 would play, teams that are 1-1 would play and teams that are 0-2 would play.

This would continue on until the predetermined number of rounds has been reached.

The basic rule of thumb is that no teams should ever face off twice.