Unrated Tournaments: Cautions

If none or few of the players in a tournament have a rating, there are two important things to keep in mind:

Rating Calculations

The calculation of performance ratings and new ratings will be meaningless when most players are unrated. These calculations depend on a player base with established ratings to work well.

Bye Assignment Settings

You should set the “Bye strictness” value in the Rules for pairing dialog to “Relaxed”. This will prevent SwissSys from futilely attempting to find a player with a rating to whom it can assign a bye.

Recommendations for Unrated Tournaments

• Use “Relaxed” bye strictness setting
• Consider using estimated ratings for pairing purposes
• Focus on fair pairings rather than rating calculations
• Be aware that performance statistics will not be meaningful