How to Manage a Swiss System Competition Round

Learn how to effectively organize and progress through multiple rounds of a Swiss system tournament. This guide walks you through drawing matches and updating results to ensure a smooth competition flow.

Matthew Warr
19 steps
2 minutes

Round Configuration

To setup a Swiss System competition, it assumes you have already set up the base competition details and have a list of entrants. You need to be on the **Rounds** phase of the competition setup. Within this single Round, the Swiss System will utilise Subrounds based upon the number of wins an entry has.

Select 'Swiss System (Beta)' from the Round Type dropdown.

You will notice the number of entries in your competition on the right hand side. This is important to consider when drawing matches as if it is an odd number, 1 player won't be drawn per subround.

Click "Draw First Matches" to generate the first subround

The top of the Swiss System section shows you your entries based upon the number of wins they have. You will see these lists expand as the competition progresses.

Scrolling down you will see the list of matches that are drawn. You can expand and contract the matches - which will be useful for later subrounds.

Click "Start Swiss System" to begin the competition, and click 'Continue' to confirm starting the round.

Playing The First Subround

You can score the matches in all the standard ways that RackEmApp supports. This could be through the mobile app, the electronic scoreboard, or tablet scoring.

Or you can just use the admin editor.

Repeat the scoring procerss for all matches in the subround.

Playing Next Subrounds

As the first subrounds matches are completed, you will see the win pots with the names of those that won the matches. You can draw the next subround of matches clicking the button.

You'll see the matches drawn are based on the number of wins played. If there is an uneven number it will pick a player with the next number of wins. It will always try to avoid players playing each other more than once, but in some competitions it is a mathematical inevitability.

As matches get completed the entry win pots are dynamically updated.

When you are ready, you can click Draw Round X. You can do this at any time during the subround.

The next subround will draw the matches anyway and draw "winner of" and "loser of" entries. These will automatcially get updated as upstream matches get completed.

Qualification

As the tournament progresses, you will have entries that qualify based on whatever criteria you set. Usually this is based on number of wins. When you want to mark someone as qualified, press the button indicated. It will mark them with a Q. Tapping it again will un-qualify them.

Once a player is marked as Qualified, they get removed from the draw. You can continue running as many subrounds as you need to to get as many qualifying players as you need.

Completion

When you at least 1 qualified player you can complete the competition. When ou have at least 2 qualified players, you can Progress to Next Round.

Going to another round is typically so you can have your qualified players proceed to some form of knockout.

Which you can see in the next round, which displayed the qualified entries for you to do whatever you need to next.