I have read through the X-Wing tournament rules and found them to be very confusing, particularly in the Seeding section.

First off, " Standard Swiss style pairings are used (see FFG Organized Play support page for details)." I have found no such documentation on swiss style pairings in the FFG support page. There are many variants of pairings in swiss style tournaments, and FFG's rules explain three of them.

Score Group

FFG Does not define what a "Score Group" is. In normal swiss tournaments this is the points you win by playing, 1.0 point for a win, 0.5 for a tie and 0 for a loss. FFG gives tournament points at the end of a match worth 5, 3, 1 and 0 points - which is mentioned after the Seeding section. I think FFG means win points, since their document says, "s ort the players in each score group by player number, then pair the top number to the bottom, the second to the second to last and so on. This allows for the subtle adjustment of players if one player has already played another player and has the same effect as using brackets so that the top 2 players do not meet until the last round. "

Let's assume that I have 8 players and the results of the first round matches are 5:0, 5:0, 3:0 and 3:0. Players 1 and 2 each scored 5 tournament points and players 3 and 4 scored 3, though all four have scored 1 win point.

(1) If I seed by tournament points, then my two best players so far will face each other in round two, which is in conflict with the underlined text above.

(2) If I seed using win points and " pair the top number to the bottom, the second to the second to last" then 1 plays 4 and 2 plays 3.

(3) The example listed in the document says 1 should play 3 and 2 should play 4, so now we have three was to pair that FFG has presented in the section.

When I look up swiss pairing in wikipedia it says to use option (3).

Breaking Ties

This section says to first combine opponents' match points. Is this win points or tournament points?

The only time tournament points is mentioned is in the championship bracket formation. As others have pointed out, you can have a higher tournament points going 2-0-1 (5,5,0) than 3-0-0 (3,3,3).

Does anyone else find this confusing?

My local store has used the Wizards of the Coast M:tg tournament sytem for all swiss tournaments. It pairs players based on method (3) and then sorts them by strength of schedule. Any tournaments I run will not have a championship bracket, so it appears that I don't have to keep track of tournament points.

I don't find it confusing at all. FFG's Tournament scoring rules seem very straight forward to me. Like all Swiss System variations, the best play the best. This ensures that the cream rises to the top.

Their 5-3-1-0 system rewards decisive victories as opposed to eking them out.

Now you may not like it, but that is the direction FFG has chosen to go.

Magnus3740 said:

I think this is at the heart of your confusion. "Score group" is a fairly common term in Swiss systems--it's just a set of players in which every player has the same score.

In your example with eight players, two of whom have Wins and two have Modified Wins, you would pair the two 5-point players together (the "5" score group), then pair the two 3-point players together (the "3" score group), then pair Player 5 with Player 8 and Player 6 with Player 7 (the "0" score group).

This is option (2) in your post. This does appear to conflict with "…the top 2 players do not meet until the last round", but the whole point of a Swiss system is to pair each player with the player who is closest in score. Your example is a corner case that will appear only when the top two players are the only remaining players with perfect records.

Yeah, swiss only makes it so that the top 2 meet in the last round because no matter which round is the last round, the current "top 2" will be paired. It does work very much like a bracket system like that, but without the trouble of setting up a "losers bracket" or such thing.