Chess Swiss tournament generator
The format chess invented. Every player plays every round, each one against somebody on the same score, and the pairing for the next round is drawn the moment the last game of this one is entered.
- Rounds
- 5
- The fewest that can still leave one team unbeaten.
- Matches
- 84
- Including semi-finals and a third-place match for the top four.
- Matches each
- 5
- Nobody is knocked out — everyone plays every round.
- Roughly how long
- 17 h 30 min on 2 courts
- Allowing 25 minutes a match, courts running in parallel.
Free, and there is no account to make first. About a minute to the QR code.
Pairings without a pairing program
Finishing a round is what draws the next one, from the table as it stood at that moment — never from the round being drawn, which is the mistake that produces a pairing that depends on its own result. There is nothing to press and no file to import.
The draw avoids rematches. On a small field over a long tournament it will eventually run out of fresh opponents and repeat a meeting; nothing is wrong when that happens, but you are told rather than left to spot it.
Byes score a point
An odd field means somebody sits out each round, and that bye takes the point. Scoring it zero would send whoever happened to be the odd one out to the bottom of the table for something they had no part in — which is exactly the opposite of what a bye means in a knockout bracket, where it is a free pass and scores nothing.
What it does not do
This is not a FIDE-rated pairing engine. It does not implement Dutch or Burstein pairing rules, it does not balance colours, and it does not compute Buchholz. It pairs on score, avoids rematches, and ranks on points and the tiebreakers you configure. For a club night or a school tournament that is the whole job; for a rated event it is not.
Common questions
How many rounds for 32 players?
Five — ceil(log2(32)) — which is the fewest that can still leave exactly one player unbeaten.
Does it balance colours?
No. It pairs on score and avoids rematches; colour allocation is not implemented.
Does it calculate Buchholz?
No. Ranking is on points and the configurable tiebreakers — head-to-head, score difference, and so on.