Every Swiss tournament has one round where you look at the pairing sheet and think there’s been a mistake.
You’re on 1.0.
They’re on 2.0.
They’re calm.
You’re not.
This is usually when someone explains that you’ve been “upfloated” or “downfloated,” which sounds like something gentle and nautical, not like being thrown into a game you didn’t ask for.
A float is just the system admitting it’s boxed in.
After a couple of rounds, players sit in score groups. Two points. One and a half. One. Half. Zero. In a perfect world, everyone plays inside their group and nobody gets upset.
Swiss tournaments are not a perfect world.
Sometimes there’s an odd number in a group. Sometimes colours won’t work. Sometimes two players have already played. Sometimes a bye or a late entry has punched a hole straight through the logic.
When that happens, someone has to move.
An upfloat means you play someone with a higher score.
A downfloat means you play someone with a lower one.
Nobody volunteers.
What people forget is that the system isn’t trying to be fair in a single game. It’s trying to stay legal across the whole tournament. No repeats. No impossible colour runs. No broken score ladders that wreck the next round even more.
Last season I got upfloated in Round 3. I was on 1.0 after winning ugly in Round 1 and losing cleanly in Round 2. I expected a normal board. Instead I got Board 2, Black, against a kid who looked like he’d been winning quietly since birth.
I spent the first ten moves trying to work out why me.
Afterwards I did the maths. There were five players on 2.0. Someone had to come up. One of the 1.0 kids had already played two of them. Another would have repeated colours for the third time in a row. I was the neatest option.
That’s the part nobody tells you when you’re twelve and annoyed. Sometimes the reason is boring.
Floats also mess with colours, which makes people angrier. You finally think you’re due White and then you’re Black again because the alternative pairing breaks something else. Colour preference exists, but it’s not the boss.
I lost that game quickly. Not because the position was hopeless, but because I spent half the time feeling like I didn’t belong on that board. That’s another side effect of upfloats. You start playing the score instead of the pieces.
Downfloats are weird in a different way. You feel like you’re supposed to win. If you don’t, it feels worse than a normal loss. If you do, nobody notices.
Swiss doesn’t care how it feels. It just keeps stacking constraints until one option survives.
Once you see that, floats stop feeling personal. They’re not punishment. They’re not a compliment either. They’re just the system choosing the least bad move available.
I still don’t like them. But now when I get one, I stop looking for the mistake and start looking at the board.
It’s usually kinder.