Why Haida?The Haida and other indigenous peoples of the North Pacific coast of North America, are known for poles, often called totem poles, which are usually carved out of a single log. The symbols on these poles are arranged vertically. While most Swiss System pairings depend upon seeding to determine the pairing numbers (so seeding is important), in the Haida variation, the seeding also determines the number of points you score, so is very important. Like the order of the symbols on the pole.
The Haida Pairing System is a method of competition originally designed, by me, in the late 1970s, for team chess tournaments in the style of the Chess Olympics. 2008 note: The Chess Olympics have always been held with scoring by game points, but for 2008 scoring will be by match points. It strikes me that the Haida system is a better way to deal with leapfrogging (see below).
The Haida Pairing System, so far as I know, has been implemented only for an individual chess tournament, the 1980 Ottawa Labour Day Open.
The Haida System awaits its first application in a team event, or outside the realm of chess.
The Haida Pairing System is both an alternative to, and a generalization of, the standard Swiss System of pairings.
18 January 2005 note: Just a few minutes ago I heard about the Keizer System (link updated, Nov 2008), which resembles the Haida System in its approach to scoring the games. Since the Keizer System is supposed to date from the 1950s, and the Haida System from the mid-1970s, I hereby acknowledge that it came first!
Tournament Announcement and Report for 1980 Ottawa Labour Day Open
System Proposal as presented to FIDE, the World Chess Federation, at its 1980 and 1996 Congresses. Appendices are: Mockup Event 1, Mockup Event 2, and Randomized table of results from the Haifa 1976 Chess Olympics.
The Haida Pairing System eliminates leapfrogging in team tournaments. Team events tend to produce a steep gradient near the middle of the pack. For example, the group with +1 is likely to have met a much tougher average field than the group with -1. So a team with +1 may meet a strong team in the same group, and score a decent 1.5 points. At the same time, a team with -1 (two points less) might meet a team which it can and does deal with dramatically, say 4-0, and suddenly it has leapfrogged over the team from the higher group. It has probably also met a weaker field in its other rounds, too.
2008. The Olympiad is now held on the basis of match points. Here are the pairing rules.
Until 2006, pairings were on the basis of game points, and in later years a variation of the Dubov pairing approach was in force for the Chess Olympiads, rounds 5-14. The document at the FIDE web site has been superceded and erased, but through the magic of the Internet Archive Wayback machine, here is what it once looked like: FIDE Handbook 07a. Olympiad Pairing Rules 45, Section J (45-51). This approach, which tries to equalize the Buchholz tiebreaks within a group, does serve to equalize the strength of opposition within the group, but does nothing about leapfrogging, which is a particular problem with team events.
URL: This web page is:
http://members.shaw.ca/berry5868/haid_int.htm
Last modified November 12, 2008