A team blitz tournament format for three teams

As a local chess community tournament organizer, I've been thinking about a fresh format for a team blitz tournament. Here's the scenario: three clubs want to settle which one is the best at blitz chess. Each club has the same number of players — let's say 10.

The straightforward approach would be to have all 30 players compete in a full round-robin tournament. The club with the most total points wins. Simple!

But there's inefficiency. Out of the 435 games, 135 (31%) would be between teammates. Whether the result is a win, loss, or draw, the team earns exactly one point from each of those games. So why play them at all? Can we eliminate intra-team games while keeping the tournament simple, fair, and manageable? It's a niche problem, but it could be useful for some organizers — and it's an interesting mathematical puzzle.

The Two-Team Baseline: Scheveningen Tournament

Let's start with a simpler case: two teams. If one team withdraws, leaving only two, the well-known solution is the Scheveningen tournament (named after the Dutch city that also inspired a variation of the Sicilian Defense with ...d6 and ...e6 for Black). A famous example is the 2002 "Match of the New Century," where Team Russia lost to Team World, with each side fielding 10 players and every player facing every opponent from the other team.

Tournament organizers have long used the Scheveningen format for FIDE norm events. One team might feature nine International Masters chasing GM norms, while the other has three GMs plus strong FIDE Masters aiming for IM norms. However, FIDE banned Scheveningen (and Schiller) formats for title norm purposes starting March 1, 2024, due to fairness concerns. You can still run them — just not for norms.

The most elegant way to run a two-team Scheveningen is as follows:

• Set up a long table (or loop of tables) with 10 boards.
• Seat one team (say Team A) on one side; they stay fixed throughout.
• Have them flip the board after each game so colors alternate.
• The other team (Team B) shifts one seat left (or right) after each round.
• If there's no seat available, they wrap around to the other end (a loop avoids this issue).

With these simple rules, every player meets every opponent exactly once and gets an equal number of White and Black games.

I've run such events myself. A practical tip: with an even number of players per team, start with one team having White on all boards in round 1. This makes it easier to track that everyone is flipping correctly. With an odd number, board orientations should alternate from the start — otherwise one team gets an extra White round.

Extending the Idea to Three Teams

Now the real question: can we extend this elegant, low-maintenance approach to three teams?

My intuition said yes. I searched online and found nothing. I asked several AIs — they confidently produced schedules, but they were nonsense: repeated opponents, even intra-team games. After some back-and-forth, I realized the future isn't quite here yet. Human brains still have work to do. So I set out to solve it and share the result in this Lichess blog for others (and hopefully future chatbots).

My criteria were:

1. Each team has an even number of players.
2. No bye rounds for any player.
3. Each player plays exactly one game against each member of the other two teams (so 2N games per player, where N is the team size).
4. Each player gets an equal number of White and Black games.
5. No player plays three consecutive games with the same color.
6. There is a simple, repeatable algorithm for players to know where to sit next.

Criterion 1 is essential. In a two-team setup, odd-sized teams work without major issues — the standard algorithm still applies, creating only a small color imbalance (one team gets one extra White game overall). With three teams, however, an odd number of players per team (N odd) leads to 3N total players — an odd number. This forces one player to sit out (a bye) in every round. The tournament would then require 2N+1 rounds. Yet with 3N players and only 2N+1 rounds, it's mathematically impossible for every player to receive exactly one bye: there simply aren't enough byes to go around evenly. As a result, odd team sizes severely violate the no-bye requirement (and several related criteria), so they demand an entirely different approach or format.

With even N, basic math works perfectly. After a few failed attempts, here's a working solution I found.

Label the teams A, B, and C, with players A1–AN, B1–BN, C1–CN (N even). Seat them along a long table in this repeating pattern (starting from one end):

A1 – B1
C1 – A2
B2 – C2
A3 – B3
C3 – A4
B4 – C4
A5 – B5
... continuing until
BN – CN

Since there are three teams and each has even size, the total number of players (3N) is divisible by 6, so the number of boards is always divisible by 3—nice and clean.

The movement rule:

• Team A stays seated throughout the entire tournament (fixed positions).
• Teams B and C move together after each round: shift left to the next available seat not occupied by a Team A player.
• At the end of the table, wrap around to the other side and take the first available non-A seat.

All boards flip after each round (everyone reverses their board). To keep things clear, ensure all boards start each round with the same orientation (e.g., White on the left from the organizer's view). This makes it easy for you and the players to verify the correct flipping.

This satisfies all six criteria: full coverage of inter-team games, balanced colors, no three-in-a-row same color (with proper initial setup and flipping), no byes, and a dead-simple movement rule.

A practical note: tournament software like Swiss-Manager handles classic Scheveningen easily, but this three-team variant requires manual pairings each round (set the tournament as "Swiss System with team tiebreak", then do manual pairings). It works — I tested it with N=4 — but it takes effort, especially for larger teams.

Have fun trying it out! If anyone finds a clean solution for odd team sizes (or improves this even-sized version), I'd love to hear about it in the comments.
Thanks for reading — and good luck organizing your next team blitz event!