A Swiss tournament has a defined number of rounds. Each player plays in every round, and the player with the most points at the end of the tournament is the winner.
In the first round, highly ranked players are intentionally paired with lower-ranked players. After the first round, pairings are based on performance: those who have won are paired with other winners, losers with losers. There might be some exceptions to prevent a player from playing with the same color pieces too many times in a row.
The first pairing is set at the start time of the event. Subsequent pairings are set as soon as the last game of the previous round finishes.
Players have to be active (an open window in a browser is enough) on Immortal Game within 30s before the matchmaking to be part of the matchmaking. Participants are notified on the platform 30 seconds before a game starts.
The white clock starts at the scheduled time, whether the white player is connected* or not. Default timing between the end of the last game of a round and the beginning of the next round is set by tournament admin. Tournament can be paused/restarted by tournament admin.
*on the platform with the account registered for the event.
Registration (required):
- Players must register to the tournament before half the number of rounds of the tournament minus 1, rounded up, are played. Examples: before end of 4th round for a 10 rounds tournament, before end of 5th round for an 11 rounds tournament.
Scoring system:
- Loss: +0 point
- Draw: +0.5 point
- Win: +1 point
Special cases:
- You are connected and your opponent is not, you win the game.
- You are not connected, you lose the game.
- If the number of participants to be paired in a round is odd, the participant who cannot be paired is exempted and thus receives 1 point for that round. They can only be exempted once per tournament.
- You were not included in the matchmaking of a round: 0 point for this round.
- If a player is disqualified for cheating after the tournament has concluded, they will be removed from the leaderboard. Consequently, every player ranked below them will move up one position. The scores of all players will remain unchanged.
In the event of a tie, the following systems are applied in the following order:
- Buchholz cut 1 - Your Buchholz score is calculated by adding up the tournament scores of each player you played against, excluding the one with the lowest score (this is the "cut 1"). The final number is your Buchholz cut 1 tiebreak score.
- Buchholz - Similar to the above, except that the lowest score is not excluded and is included in the calculation.
- Sonneborn-Berger - This score is calculated by adding up the tournament score of each opponent you have beaten, and half of the tournament score of each opponent with whom you have drawn.
- Number of wins.
- Number of wins with the black pieces.
- Direct encounter - If any players are still tied at this point, and all tied players have played against each other in the tournament, then the player with the most points out of those games is the winner. If the tied players have not all played each other, or there is a tie for points within those games, then it is still a tie.
- AROC 1 - This stands for Average Rating of Opponents Cut 1. This means the rating of all your opponents (excluding the lowest rated opponent) is averaged, and the player with the highest average opponent rating is the winner. Opponent rating is based on rating at the start of each round.
Please note that technical problems, like connection issues, will not be grounds for contesting the course content or the outcome of a game.