Thanks for raising the topic and sharing the method, too. Did you have to code and run a special version of tournament software? (Vega?)
It would be nice for chess.com to implement daily Swiss.
Swiss system for daily tournaments? It's quite possible!
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We used the own software. It was developed in C#. I can share the code.
On the site Chess.com there are many competitions in daily chess. If there are many participants in a tournament, a complex multi-stage round-robin system is used. This system has a number of disadvantages. I'm sure many of the competition organizers were wondering if the Swiss system could be adapted for mass daily chess tournaments. The advantages of the Swiss system are well known, and first of all, it is possible to hold tournaments with a large number of participants in a short time. However, the usual "Swiss" can not be used in daily chess for a number of reasons.
We, in the Russian team, have come up with some improvements for the usual Swiss system, and now it has become possible to apply it also for daily chess tournaments. This advanced Swiss system has long been successfully used in domestic tournaments of the Russian team.
To explain how it works, I want to use the example of the Russian team championship in 2019:
- 81 people went to the start
- The tournament is held according to the advanced Swiss system
- Standard control 3 days per move
- During the year, 6 tours were created with an interval of 2 months. In one round each participant plays 2 games with different opponents with different colors (one game with white, one - with black). Thus, each participant plays 12 games during the championship.
- The total duration of the tournament is approximately 1.5 years (six rounds per year plus about six months of finishing the last protracted games).
There are two radical differences between a "daily Swiss-system" and a regular one:
The next round is created without waiting for the end of all previous games. The situation when participants plays several games from different rounds at the same time is quite common, and does not cause any problems.
In each round a participant plays not one but two games. There is also a possibility to increase number of games per round even more to speed up the tournament.
When the pairing procedure for the next round is going, the unfinished games are considered to be draws. This is a purely technical trick, it is used only to divide participants into groups according to the number of obtained points. These "hypothetical draws" are not recorded anywhere, the games are played to the end in the future, and their actual result is written in the tournament table.
The advantages of the Swiss system are well known. I want to highlight one of them: the duration of the tournament does not depend on the number of participants. It gives us the possibility to hold competitions with a large number of players in a relatively short time.
I believe that if the Swiss system becomes one of the official ones on the site, many organizers of daily chess tournaments will want to use it.