ISF Stratego events use the Swiss System which arranges for pairings of players with similar strengths. However the pairing rules for the first round are less than perfect: Let there be N players and let the players be sorted by their playing strength: 1 is the strongest and N is the weakest player. Then, supposed that N is even, player 1 plays against N/2+1, 2 plays against N/2+2, …. You can be virtually certain that in the first round the stronger players win against the weaker players. This is not only frustrating for both players, but also it yields no significant information. In particular this is annoying if juniors are paired against seniors.
To avoid exceptional inhomogeneous pairings, the players can be devided into groups. SBN Stratego used the following nomenclature:
| Mnemonic | Meaning |
|---|---|
| top | Top players. Commonly they play a round-robin tournament. Top groups are rare. |
| ere | Strong players. Normally they are selected by their rating. |
| 1st | Weak players. Normally they are selected by their rating. |
| 2nd | Junior players. |
| sp1 | A technical group name without semantics. It is used to overcome the limitations of repeated pairing and if the players do not fit into one of the standard groups (e.g. beginner tournaments). |
| sp2 | A technical group name without semantics. C.f. sp1. |
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