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How to run a round robin chess tournament

Everyone plays everyone. Simple to explain, easy to get wrong — the schedule, the colours, the clock, and the player who drops out in week three.

Last updated: 25 July 2026 · Rules verified against the current FIDE and US Chess texts on 25 July 2026.

A round robin is the fairest format in chess and the least forgiving of your calendar. Every player meets every other player exactly once. No pairing algorithm to defend, no score groups, no accusation that somebody got an easy draw. The catch is that the work grows as the square of the field: double the entries and you quadruple the games. That one fact decides almost everything below.

What a round robin is, and when it beats a Swiss

In a round robin — an all-play-all — the schedule is fixed before round one and never changes. Nobody is eliminated, nobody sits out unless the field is odd, and nobody can be paired “unluckily”. Working directors converge on the same cutoffs:

• Six or fewer: round robin, no debate. A Swiss that small runs out of legal pairings almost immediately.
• Seven to ten: round robin if the calendar allows. Ten players is nine rounds — a full term at one round a week.
• Eleven or twelve: the ceiling, and a slog. Eleven rounds is long enough that people lose interest and drop out.
• Thirteen and up: don't. Run a Swiss, split the field into rating-banded round robins, or cut it into quads.

Put simply: a round robin gives you a perfect result and a schedule problem; a Swiss gives a good result and no schedule problem.

The arithmetic: rounds and games

Three formulas cover everything, where N is the number of players:

• Rounds = N − 1 if N is even, N if it is odd — the extra round exists because one player sits out each time.
• Games = N × (N − 1) / 2, halved because each game involves two people.
• Double round robin = N × (N − 1) games over twice as many rounds.

Look at the jump from 8 to 16: the field doubles, the games go from 28 to 120. That curve is why the ceiling sits around twelve.

The circle method, step by step

You can generate any round robin schedule by hand in two minutes — worth knowing even if software does it for you, because it lets you check the output.

1. Number the players 1 to N. Write the first half in a row: 1, 2, 3…
2. Write the second half underneath, reversed. Each column is a pairing.
3. Fix player 1 in place and rotate every other number one position around the loop — right along the top row, down the end, back along the bottom row.
4. Repeat for N − 1 rounds.

For six players:

Five rounds, three boards each, fifteen games — and every one of the fifteen possible pairs appears exactly once. That is the check to run: count the pairings and confirm the total equals N(N − 1)/2.

For an odd field, add a ghost player. Seven entrants become eight numbers, where number 8 does not exist; whoever is scheduled against the ghost has a bye. FIDE handles it exactly this way: “Where there is an odd number of players, the highest number counts as a bye.” Say in advance whether that bye is worth a point or nothing — in a round robin the usual choice is nothing.

Berger tables — the schedules FIDE publishes

A Berger table is a pre-computed round robin schedule with the colours already assigned. The circle method tells you who plays whom; a Berger table also tells you who has White. The official set is in the FIDE Handbook, C.05 Annex 1, covering fields from three to thirty. US Chess publishes an equivalent set, the Crenshaw–Berger tables; they serve the same purpose. Two of the most useful — left-hand number has White:

Five or six players — with five, whoever faces number 6 has the bye:

Seven or eight players — with seven, whoever faces number 8 has the bye:

Note what the highest number does: 8 has Black, White, Black, White, Black, White, Black — perfect alternation. It is the pivot the table rotates around, and nobody in either table gets three of the same colour in a row. The numbers 1 to N are starting numbers, not ratings: assign them once, by lot or by rating, and publish them, because the whole schedule hangs off them.

Colours, and the unavoidable ±1

With an even field you play an odd number of rounds, and an odd number of games cannot split evenly, so every player finishes one colour ahead: in a six-player event everyone ends 3–2 or 2–3. That is arithmetic, not a bug. An odd field is quietly better — seven players play seven rounds but six games each, and six games split perfectly 3–3.

A double round robin fixes it exactly: play the schedule twice with colours reversed and everyone finishes level. One gotcha, which FIDE spells out on the same page as the tables: “For a double-round tournament it is recommended to reverse the order of the last two rounds of the first cycle.” Without that swap, the join between the cycles hands somebody three games of the same colour in a row.

How long it actually takes

This is the section nobody writes, and the one that decides whether your event finishes. Use the standard estimate: per-player minutes = base + increment or delay in seconds; worst-case game = twice that; scheduled round = worst case plus 15 minutes of changeover.

The last column assumes a three-hour club night and two rounds at G/25 d5. Read it honestly: above about eight players a round robin stops being an event and becomes a season. A twelve-player club championship at a classical control is roughly eleven consecutive weeks — long enough that somebody will move house or stop turning up. If it does not fit, use a faster control, a double session, or a smaller field. The rounds calculator runs these sums for your own field.

Quads — the format most clubs should be running

A quad is the round robin's practical answer to a big field, and the dominant club and scholastic format in the United States. Rank the field by rating; cut it into groups of four (seeds 1–4, 5–8, 9–12 and so on); each group plays its own three-round round robin simultaneously; prizes per group.

The magic is that the round count never changes. Sixteen players is three rounds. Forty players is three rounds. Every entrant gets three games against opponents close to their own strength — far better chess than the 400-point mismatch a big open Swiss produces in round one. Three rounds at G/25 d5 is under four hours.

If your entry does not divide by four, do not leave a group of three behind: merge the bottom seven or nine into one five- or six-player round robin, which the Berger table above handles directly.

When a player withdraws

This is what actually breaks round robins, and almost no guide covers it. In a Swiss a withdrawal is a nuisance. In a round robin it is a fairness problem, because who the departing player had already faced changes everybody else's score.

FIDE's general competition regulations resolve it with a threshold, worth adopting verbatim at club level:

• A player who has completed at least 50% of their games has their results counted in the final standings.
• A player who has completed fewer than 50% has their results removed from the standings. The games stay in the crosstable and are still rated — they were real games — but they no longer influence who wins.
• Unplayed games are marked (−) for the absent player and (+) for the opponent who turned up.

Applied to the example: seven rounds, so the threshold is four games. Withdrawing after three takes all three results out of the standings. Withdrawing after four means they stand, and the last three opponents each collect a (+).

Publish the rule in your announcement — deciding after the fact always looks like favouritism.

Variants: Scheveningen, group stages, double round robin

Scheveningen. Two teams of equal size; every player faces every player on the other team and nobody plays a team-mate. Named after the Dutch town that hosted the 1923 tournament using it. Two teams of six is six rounds and 36 games — a tidy shape for a club match, with friendlier arithmetic than a twelve-player all-play-all.

Group stage into a knockout. The 2022 FIDE Grand Prix used four pools of four, each playing a double round robin, with the pool winners going to the semifinals. It scales down neatly: sixteen club players in four pools of four, six pool rounds at two an evening is three evenings, then semifinals and a final. Six evenings, 51 games, six games each — against fifteen rounds and 120 games for a straight sixteen-player round robin. See the knockout guide for the bracket half.

Double round robin. Everyone meets twice, once with each colour — standard for elite invitationals and very small fields, where five rounds is too short an event. Six players doubled is ten rounds and 30 games.

Tiebreaks for a round robin

A round robin needs a different tiebreak from a Swiss, for a reason worth stating plainly.

The conventional order for a round robin is:

1. Sonneborn-Berger — the standard. Add the final scores of everyone you beat, plus half the final score of everyone you drew with. It rewards beating the players who finished high.
2. Direct encounter — the result of the game between the tied players.
3. Koya — points scored against opponents who finished on 50% or better.

The tiebreak guide works through the arithmetic, including how byes and forfeits are handled. Whichever you choose, publish the order before round one.

Frequently asked questions