English Chess Forum

That's going to end in tears. Suppose after 5 rounds of a 7-round RBT, you have the following: 1 Average Annie 1600 (5/5) seeks White 2 Freddie the Favourite 2300 (4½/5) seeks Black 3 Dangerous Dave 2250 (4/5) seeks White ... 30 Freddie the Favourite's Teammate 1750 (0/5) Freddie the Favourite is u...

one could argue that RBT is fairer still than Dubov: it aims to ensure that players will face opponents of comparable strength relative to their own ratings . One could also argue that it's less fair because it penalises strong players for being strong players. Withdrawals are rarely an issue in ra...

[...] You keep insisting that Swiss is superior and must not be challenged. But the Swiss systems recognized by FIDE have weaknesses and are not fair in every respect. FIDE acknowledge that the Swiss pairing rules can be optimised even further , at the cost of a certain amount of transparency and s...

RBT is not intended to replace the Swiss system, but to offer an alternative—particularly for amateur, blitz, and rapid tournaments. For this reason, the strong negative reactions to it seem rather puzzling. What's wrong with a fair pairing system that sets the rounds in advance and makes for a mor...

I don't think you've quite understood your own invention on a deep enough level to be able to process what people are feeding back to you about it. There is a vast amount of academic literature on pairing systems. Here is a representative paper from fairly recently. Not only have we compared the Sw...

The concept of a tournament where all the participants have the same strength of schedule doesn't seem to be that mad to me. It isn't dissimilar to the Dubov pairing system for Swisses, for example; which were common enough to be included in the FIDE Handbook, but never computerised. If this system...

What I do not understand is your apparent fixation on the idea that lower-rated players should never receive any share of the prize fund. Why shouldn't they at least have a chance, however small, to achieve a high placing? After all, the purpose of a tournament is to determine results over the boar...

RBT is ... not particularly conducive to presenting the right person with the winner's cheque Nonsense! Everyone at the chess club will love this format for blitz and rapid. Do you agree, or disagree, with Chris's comment? If you disagree, why? How would you suggest prizes are awarded with this pai...

RBT is garbage. Sorry. Minimising difference in schedule strength across all participants is a) not particularly conducive to presenting the right person with the winner's cheque, b) actively opposed to the goal of maximising competitive jeopardy, and c) able to be implemented much better than you'...

RBT is garbage. Sorry. Minimising difference in schedule strength across all participants is a) not particularly conducive to presenting the right person with the winner's cheque, b) actively opposed to the goal of maximising competitive jeopardy, and c) able to be implemented much better than you'...

Isn't this just a version of how UEFA handles the Champions League draw, but with a much greater emphasis on rating differences? UEFA the 36 teams into 4 pots of 9 based on their rating, and each team plays two teams at random from each of the 4 pots.' You've just generalised it a bit in terms of t...

I was challenged to design the best pairing system ever and thought it was impossible. Who challenged you? A person in the Swedish Chess Federation's Facebook group. I initially set out to implement Monrad, but once I had done that, I got a taste for it and began exploring more ambitious pairing sy...

Why would a strong player agree to compete in a tournament where a weaker player can play worse than him and finish on a higher score? That's essentially a handicap tournament, isn't it? If you want to know which of the two 2500 players is playing the best chess this week, having them play each oth...

Why would you want to send a player into Round 6 with a score of 5/5 achieved entirely against players from the lower half of the rating list? What information do you gain from having player 1 beat that player easily, that you haven't already gained from player 1 beating five opponents from the top...

With a Swiss pairing system, prizes are usually awarded to the players who scored most points because they played better than players who scored fewer points. Obviously, it's not perfect because players who start poorly and finish strongly tend to play weaker opponents, on average, than those who s...