You are not logged in.
Dear Maths Community!
I hope that this thread goes into the correct subforum - I was not sure where else to put it.
I’m not exactly a mathematician—more of a chemist who dabbles in coding and chess on the side. My chess club is gearing up to host a bughouse chess competition, which, if you’re not familiar, is a fun, fast-paced 2v2 version of chess (played on two boards in parallel).
Here’s our challenge: We want to pull off this 2v2 tournament but also come up with individual player rankings. We’re thinking of adapting a Swiss system where, besides getting a new opponent each round, players also get assigned a new partner. Wins and losses score points for both players in a team—1 point for a win, 0 for a loss. The trick is to set it up so that nobody teams up more than once or faces the same opponents too often (once as a partner and once as an opponent is okay).
This kind of setup already exists and is called "Draw Your Partner" (DYP), or "MonsterDYP" when you switch partners every round. But the random partner draw these systems use seems a bit hit-or-miss for our needs.
Here’s where I’m stuck: I understand how Swiss draws typically work—pairing the top player with the lowest-ranked player who has the same number of points and then working your way through the list. Last year we hosted such a tournament where I had the Swiss Algorithm implemented in a way, that it would first make pairs and then match the pairs against each other. The partner-search was done via Swiss Draw, while the Opponent search was trying to find the best matching ranking average between partners (like teaming up No. 1 and 4 to face No. 2 and 3).
For this year, I want to develop a system that's truly fair, but I'm hitting a wall figuring out the best approach. I’ve searched the internet looking for some game theory insights or related strategies, but haven’t found much that helps.
Does anyone here have experience with tweaking the Swiss system for 2v2 settings, or know of any resources that might shed some light on this? I’d really appreciate any advice or ideas on how to make the tournament as fair as possible.
Things I thought of for partner search:
*) Halving the field - Let the top seed from top half play with the best available seed from bottom half and so on. (So far I guess this is the best idea)
*) Having the top seed play with the bottom seed (not sure if this is fun for the good players to always have bad partners)
*) Find the opponent for each player first, then match opponent-pairs with each other so that the become partners. (Also very promising - however i am not sure on what criteria to judge matching of the opponent-pairs?)
Thanks in advance for your help!
Christoph
Offline