High School Team Champions
Ratings are not always accurate for growing players. In Swiss events, if a student is scoring well, the system correctly pairs them with others who are also doing well, regardless of rating.
Many young players improve quickly, so it’s common to face opponents with higher or lower ratings depending on how well each student is performing on that particular day.
Please know that the system is designed to be both fair and efficient, and it ensures that every player—no matter their rating—has the opportunity to compete, learn, and be challenged.
Our events use the Swiss Pairing System, which is used in nearly all scholastic and adult tournaments across the United States. While ratings are used for the first round, the most important factor in every round after that is score, not rating.
Here’s how it works:
- Round 1: Players are paired by rating order, where the top half is paired against the bottom half. i.e. 10 player in a section ranked 1-10 , with 1 being the highest rated player;1 plays 6, 2 plays 7, 3 plays 8, 4 plays 9, and 5 plays 10.
- Rounds 2–5: Players are grouped by score, and paired with others who have the same or very similar scores using the same top half of the group is paired against the bottom half of the score group.
- This means “winners play winners,” regardless of rating.
- A player who is doing well will often face opponents with higher ratings.
- Ratings alone do not determine pairings after Round 1, and they do not determine final standings.
We use the official US Chess tiebreak systems. When several players finish with the same number of points, tiebreaks determine the order. These tiebreaks evaluate the strength of each player’s opposition to give a fair ranking.
The tiebreaks we use include:
- Modified Median: Sums opponent scores, dropping the lowest-scoring opponent for players above 50% and the highest-scoring opponent for players below 50%.
- Solkoff: Adds all opponent scores without dropping any (Solkoff) or sometimes with a slight variation (Buchholz).
- Cumulative Score: Adds up your running score round-by-round (e.g., 1, 2, 2.5, 3.5).
- Opponents Cumulative: sums the running scores (Cumulative scores) of all your opponents throughout the tournament
Because tiebreaks depend on how a player’s opponents perform in their other games, a player can move slightly up or down in placement—even after a win. This is normal in Swiss tournaments and reflects the relative difficulty of each player’s path through the event.