We met some surprise and complaints when yesterday the best teams according to their ranking met each other in the first round of the Swiss. The main reason for doing so was provided by the regulations, which seem to order so. But most of you know me well enough to realise this not to be a decisive argument. If regulations don’t deserve it I am quite willing to propose to adjust them. This implies that I didn’t feel this regulation to be wrong.

For many years I have been wondering what is the best way to start a Swiss and I still don’t know. But I feel that when the general approach is that teams of equal strength (performance) meet each other we should not start with the strongest team playing the weakest and so on. So I prefer to divide the field in two and play the first half against the second in descending order. But really the best solution in my opinion is to start with smaller groups playing round robins and to use those rankings to decide the first round in the Swiss, team 1 playing team 2 and so on; as we did here. And we might improve that formula a little by giving a small bonus in VP’s to the teams ranked first in the round robin. That avoids giving away the last match if a team is qualifying anyway. But that won’t happen often, the more so since team 1 plays team 2 in the last round both supposed to be the strongest teams and what better idea there is than to get rid of a strong team already before the Swiss and KO?

There is another consideration. Suppose team 1 has played team 40 (or team 21 in another option) and so on. Then doing their expected job the best teams will meet each other in the second round of the Swiss. So theoretically round 1 and 2 are reversed.

What also should be taken into account is that this formula is not in the first place designed to bring us the best team but to select 27 teams to enter the KO. So it should separate the less strong teams from the others. And then ranked 27th or 28th after 5 rounds certainly depends also on some luck.

May I conclude saying that there is no best solution for this problem Yes the best teams prefer to play the weakest to start with, but that isn’t an impressive argument. So could it be that some of the quite strong reactions I received are merely based on intuition and local habits than on sound considerations?

Or could it be that I do overlook some convincing reasons not to repeat this idea anymore? Let me hear your arguments please.

Ton Kooijman