Does the Swiss System pairing system work well if all the players are not rated? The Swiss System was invented in 1895, but (if I’m not mistaken) a rating system (first the Harkness rating system, then the Elo rating system) wasn’t developed until the 1950s (the Elo system was adopted in 1960). So how did Swiss System tournaments fair between 1895 and 1950? Does anyone have any idea?
It works, but not well. Swiss system tournaments were very rare before the 1950s (the Holland System was generally used for events too large for a round-robin), but non-ratings-controlled Swisses were fairly common in Europe until the late 80s. Seeding was determined buy lot. I’ve been told by people who played in some that they were greatly inferior to American ratings-controlled Swisses, with grossly inequitable pairings in the early rounds. Greg Shahade started a campaign for no-rating Swisses a couple of years ago, but no one evinced much interest, and I really don’t think he had done his homework.
Hi John:
As SwissSys and I believe WinTD will randomly assign pairings for players with the same rating - which includes rating = null - How does this differ from “Seeding was determined by lot?” Why the judgment that it does not work well? I run a Navy Surface week tournament each year with about 98% unrated and SwissSys works fine. Just have to remember to check and manually pair the byes if necessary as this year I forgot and the tournament leader got the 2nd rd. bye because he was the only rated player.
Regards, Ernie
To: Ernie,
It is not that one cannot use a Swiss System pairings when most of the participants are not rated, but (and this was the reason or my question) it seems to me that there is no way to determine that the winner of the event will play against the stronger opposition. Theoretically, the stronger players might randomly get paired against each other in the early rounds, possibly knocking themselves out of contention for 1st place through draws; and some mid-level player might get randomly paired against weaker opposition allowing him or her to win 1st place.
Of course, if no one knows who are the stronger players and who are the weaker players, no one would be able to notice if something like this happened. I find it interesting that you use a Swiss System with mostly unrated players, and you don’t seem to notice any problems.
FWIW … it seems to me that without a rating system, accelerated pairings wouldn’t work at all. In accelerated pairings, during the first round the 1st quarter is paired against the 2nd quarter and the 3rd quarter is paired against the 4th quarter. Then in the second round, the losers from the top half are paired with the winners of the bottom half. The theory is that as long as the losers from the top half are much stronger than the winners of the bottom half, they will win over 50% of their second round games, thus reducing the number of participants with a perfect score. Stewart Reuben comments in his “Handbook” that for accelerated pairings to work: “At least 75% of the players should be rated and there should be a rating range of at least 400 points.”
Steven Craig Miller
It differs because in most cases, the unrated players are an insignificant minority. So are all-unrated tournaments. Both amount to an “edge effect” you have to put up with for one or two tournaments. Doing this for a whole field of rated players results in grossly inequitable pairings. It’s not unworkable, but the ratings-controlled Swiss is about 1000% better. That’s why the random-Swiss disappeared as soon as there was an alternative.
One way to minimize (somewhat) the randomness effect, at least after 2 rounds, is to use cumulative tie-breaks as a substitute for ratings. For example, in the 1-point score group after 2 rounds, players with a score history of WL would be considered higher-“rated” than those with LW, while those with DD would be somewhere in the middle.
Bill Goichberg once told me that, in a scholastic event for grades 9-12 with mostly unrated players, he even tried to use “accelerated” pairings by pairing 9th-grade winners against 12th-grade losers in round 2. It backfired, though.
Bill Smythe