A pairwise comparison approach to ranking in chess team championships

TL;DR

This paper introduces a pairwise comparison method for ranking participants in chess team championships, effectively handling strength differences and circular triads, demonstrated through the 18th European Team Chess Championship.

Contribution

It proposes a simple, linear-equation-based ranking method using pairwise comparisons, addressing challenges in Swiss-system tournament rankings.

Findings

Method accounts for opponent strength variations

Robustness to scaling techniques demonstrated

Successfully applied to European Team Chess Championship

Abstract

Chess championships are often organised as a Swiss-system tournament, causing great challenges in ranking the participants due to the different strength of schedules and possible circular triads. The paper suggests that pairwise comparison matrices perform well in similar ranking problems. Some features of the proposed method are illustrated by the results of the 18th European Team Chess Championship. The analysis is able to take into account the influence of different opponents and robust with respect to the scaling technique chosen. The method is simple to compute as a solution of a linear equation system.