A long awaited and often delayed feature is now finally available on Lidraughts: Swiss Tournaments! It is the tournament system that is most used for large over-the-board draughts tournaments. Players are paired over a fixed number of rounds, using a set of rules designed to ensure that each competitor plays opponents with a similar running score, but not the same opponent more than once. The winner is the player with the highest aggregate points earned in all rounds.

Swiss & Arenas

Swiss tournaments are intended as a complementary feature to the existing Arena tournaments and will not replace them. The Swiss tournament system differs from Arena tournaments in several important ways:

• Swiss tournaments have a predefined number of rounds, while Arena tournaments have a predefined duration
• In Arenas a player can be paired against the same opponent multiple times, while the Swiss system guarantees a players never faces the same opponent twice
• Players get a new game in Arenas as soon as an opponent is available, while in Swiss tournaments the next game starts once all games of the previous round are finished

Swiss tournaments thus progress slower and have more waiting time inbetween games. This makes it a good option for clubs and official tournaments, but less suitable for casual online play. Because of this demand for punctuality, dedication and patience from players, Swiss tournaments are limited to teams. We think these conditions are more likely to be met within a team than in global tournaments. Join or create a team to start playing in Swiss tournaments!

Pairings & tie breaks

The pairings in Swiss tournaments on Lidraughts follow the Dutch system, modified in accordance with Annex 5 of the FMJD handbook. The pairings are generated with a modified version of bbpPairings that was created by Hendrik Veenstra. It is the same pairings module that also powers the Swiss tournaments on Toernooibase.

If two or more players have the same amount of points, the tie break scores are used to determine the ranking. The first tie break is the Solkoff score: the sum of the scores of all opponents the player has faced. The second tie break is the Sonneborn–Berger score: the sum of 2 times the scores of the players against who the game was won, plus the sum of the scores of the players against who the game was drawn. If both tie beak scores are equal the performance rating decides the final ranking.

Future development

In tournaments with draughts variants on the 8x8 board (e.g. Brazilian, Russian) it is customary to play micro-matches with a random starting position from an opening table. Each round the participants play a game with white and a game with black, starting from the same randomly chosen position. The winner for each round is decided by te aggregate score of both games of the micro-match. We plan to add support in Swiss tournaments for opening tables with micro-matches in a future update.

There are currently no plans to add any other tournament systems to Lidraughts. The Round-robin system may be a more logical option than Swiss for official tournaments with a small amount of players. Unfortunately Round Robin doesn't work online. The reason is that it has no fair way of dealing with people leaving the tournament early. We cannot expect that all players will play all their games in an online event. It just won't happen, and as a result most Round Robin tournaments would be flawed and unfair, which defeats their very reason to exist. The closest you can get to Round Robin online is to play a Swiss tournament with a very high number of rounds. Then all possible pairings will be played before the tournament ends.

The Swiss system is not yet supported in the Lidraughts mobile app, so Swiss tournaments have to be played from the browser. When playing from the browser on a mobile phone you may want to disable deep linking in your phone settings. This can avoid your games opening in the Lidraughts app on each new round. If not, you have to switch back from the app to the browser after your game is finished, to return to the Swiss tournament lobby.