We had our first ‘Swiss’ type club tournament yesterday, Thursday 23rd July on lichess.org. There were 9 players in the 5-Round tournament. Everyone seemed to enjoy the format, so another one will be set up soon, but the popular Tuesday Arenas will still run too.

Congratulations to Graham Stuart (‘WillHeSac’) on winning the tournament! Well done too Rob Sims second, and Patrick Pavey third.

In the table above, scores are shown for each of the 5 rounds; the next column in bold is the player’s tournament points total, and the right hand column shows the ‘tie-break’ score – the Sonneborn-Berger score (see below). A win is worth one point, a draw is a half point, and a loss is zero points.
When a player can’t be paired during a round (odd number of players), they receive a bye worth one point. If a player joins late, they get a single half-point bye (a single bye, even if they’ve missed more than one round).

What is a Swiss Tournament?

A Swiss system tournament is a non-eliminating tournament that is comprised of a number of rounds. There are fewer rounds than a round-robin as competitors do not necessarily play all the other players. Competitors are paired with opponents with a similar running score – but not the same opponent more than once. In our regular Tuesday Arenas you could play the same player more than once as Arena pairings are any available opponent with similar ranking. See the Wikipedia definition for more information on swiss tournaments.

The winner is the player with the highest accumulated score from all the rounds. The tie-break system used on lichess is the Sonneborn-Berger score (see Wikipedia definition): basically, add the scores of every opponent you beat, and half the score of every opponent you draw.

For more information on how Swiss system tournaments run on lichess.org, see their website page on the subject.