Pairing for US Women's team - Round 3

All Things Chess
1

This may be a difficult question to answer without some information in the back room in Baku. I am curious how/why the US Women’s team (seeded #6) and the Ukraine Women’s team (seeded #2) played each other in Round #3 when there were 31 teams. It seems that adjacent score groups (by game points) within the same Match Point scoring were paired. No 2-0 Match Point team played another 2-0 team with the same Game Points. I thought by the Olympiad Pairing rules that the teams were ranked by Match Point / Game Points / Average Rating. Within a score group with 2N teams, team 1 is paired with N+1 depending on if teams have met and color allocation (article 39), then team N+2, etc.

This is the page for the pairings:

chess-results.com/tnr232876.aspx … =30&wi=821

This is the page for rankings of the women’s teams after Round 2:

chess-results.com/tnr232876.aspx … =30&wi=821

The Olympiad pairing rules from the FIDE Handbook (Section D02):
fide.com/fide/handbook.html? … ew=article

Can someone explain to me how the USA and Ukraine teams were paired together for my edification (applied for FIDE Arbiter status)?

Thank you,

Chris Kim, ANTD
Baltimore, MD

2

You are correct about the ranking criteria. I’m not sure I understand why you expect teams with the same number of game points to be paired against each other.

Score groups for pairing purposes are based on match points, just as they are under US Chess rules. Under US Chess rules, we would just order the teams by the pairing numbers based on average team rating and then divide the score group in half and pair top half against bottom half. The Olympiad pairing rules (as you correctly observe) instead order the teams within a match point score group first by total game points and only then by average rating. The top score group contains 31 teams.

Teams with 8.0 game points (the “TB3” column), in average rating order (the “SNo” column):

  1. CHN
  2. RUS
  3. LTU
  4. ITA
  5. FRA

Teams with 7.5 game points, in average rating order (6 teams total):

  1. UKR
  2. POL
  3. HUN
  4. GER
  5. SRB
  6. BLR

Teams with 7.0 game points, in average rating order:

  1. IND
  2. ROU
  3. IRI
  4. ISR
  5. VIE
  6. UZB
  7. CUB
  8. ARG
  9. COL

Teams with 6.5 game points, in average rating order:

  1. USA
  2. AZE
  3. TUR
  4. AZE2
  5. SVK
  6. SWE
  7. PHI

Teams with 6.0 game points, in average rating order:

  1. NED
  2. LAT
  3. GRE
  4. KAZ

With this ordering, USA is the 21st team in the score group, and UKR is the 6th team. As there are 31 teams, the pairings are 1-16, 2-17, 3-18, 4-19, 5-20, 6-21, and so on.