Swiss and McMahon are not strictly pairing systems they both have pairing components but that’s only a part of it.
Our basic Swiss and McMahon tournaments all pair the same way which utilizes the McMahon strength and points based pairing with some other logic (preventing the same players from being paired in further rounds… favoring alternating black and white if possible… etc). We have more pairing options coming in the near future.
For tournament structure:
- In our Swiss tournaments all players start with the same number of points: 0
- In McMahon tournaments we allow the touranment director to set upper and lower bars that determine the number of initial points that are assigned to players at the beginning of the tournament.
With McMahon tournaments we allow the TD to set the number of rounds but for swiss tournaments we compute the number of rounds for a certain number of qualified places. Right now the number of qualified places is fixed at one (determining the overall winner) but we’ll be increasing that and/or making it tunable in the future. This is the algorithm:
R = (P + 7 x Q) /5
Where P is the number of players and Q is the number of qualified places.
As @Jamada said… McMahon tournaments are designed to make sure that players are matched and group based on their skill to eliminate or reduce really lop sided games.