In the first round, competitors are paired either randomly or according to some pattern that has been found to serve a given game or sport well.
Unlike group format or other systems where all pairings are known from the beginning of the competition, in a Swiss system the match pairing for each round is done after the previous round has ended and depends on its results. In contrast, all-play-all is suitable if there is a small number of competitors whereas a single-elimination (knockout) tournament rapidly reduces the number of competitors, but without proper seeding the best competitor may not necessarily win, as good competitors might have a bad day or eliminate and exhaust each other if they meet in early rounds.
The Swiss system is used for competitions in which there are too many entrants for a full round-robin (all-play-all) to be feasible, and eliminating any competitors before the end of the tournament is undesirable. All competitors play in each round unless there is an odd number of them. The winner is the competitor with the highest aggregate points earned in all rounds.
Competitors meet one-on-one in each round and are paired using a set of rules designed to ensure that each competitor plays opponents with a similar running score, but does not play the same opponent more than once. Non-eliminating tournament format, without playing every competitorĪ Swiss-system tournament is a non-eliminating tournament format that features a fixed number of rounds of competition, but considerably fewer than for a round-robin tournament thus each competitor (team or individual) does not play all the other competitors.