The Scheveningen system: team against team

Two teams of equal size. Every player of team A plays every player of team B exactly once. Nobody plays a team-mate.

• Rounds equal the team size. Five against five is five rounds; eight against eight is eight.
• Everybody plays every round. No byes, no sitting out - which is the format's biggest practical advantage.
• Total games are N × N. Five against five is twenty-five games.
• Teams need not be equally strong, only equally numerous.

The name comes from the Dutch town where the format was first used in a major event in the 1920s. It remains rare in open tournaments and common exactly where it belongs: matches between two defined groups.

The schedule works like a round robin with the teams as two fixed halves: one team stays in place, the other rotates by one position each round.

• It is fixed before the start. Like a round robin, results do not change it, so the whole event can be printed in advance.
• Colours alternate down the boards. Within a round, team A has White on the odd boards and Black on the even ones, and the pattern flips the following round.
• Over the event colours even out for each player - with an odd team size somebody ends one White ahead, exactly as in a round robin.
• Software generates it. Any tool that handles team events produces the pairings; doing it by hand is possible but error-prone past four boards.

Publishing the full schedule is worth doing: players can see which opponent they face in which round, which is part of the appeal of a team match - schedule arithmetic.

Two scores exist at once, and it is worth deciding in advance which one decides the match.

If the team score is level, decide it as you would any other tie: the tie-break order belongs in the regulations before the first round - what to write down.

Compared with a team Swiss, the Scheveningen has one decisive advantage for a single match: every player meets every opponent, so nobody can claim the draw was kind - team events between groups.

Every pair meets twice, once with each colour. Twice the rounds and twice the games - five against five becomes ten rounds and fifty games.

• It removes the colour question entirely. Nobody can attribute a result to having had Black.
• It suits training matches. Playing the same opponent twice, with preparation in between, is a different and more instructive exercise.
• It needs a weekend, not an evening. Ten rounds of rapid is a full day at minimum.
• Split it across two days if you run it: one colour each day is the natural division.

For an amateur match the single version is almost always right; the double one belongs to training camps and serious club rivalries.

• Agree the team size first. Everything else follows from it, and it must be equal on both sides. Fix it a week before, not on the night.
• Ask for a reserve from each team. Somebody will be ill, and the format cannot absorb an absence the way a Swiss can.
• Seat the teams facing each other. Board one at the end of the row, so the match reads visually - it matters more than it sounds at a team event.
• Show the running team score. A board or a screen with the total is what makes a match feel like a match.
• Decide the board order rule. Strongest on board one is the norm; without it, teams stack their best player low to farm wins.
• Announce what happens if somebody does not turn up. A default result for the missing board, agreed in advance.

Equipment and layout are the same as any team event, with the one addition of a visible scoreboard - hall layout.