Seeding

Seeding organizes participants before games begin. The event chooses a criterion, often rating, and creates an ordered list or distributes players into positions intended to influence the initial pairings.

There is no single seeding rule for every format. In a FIDE Swiss event, the initial order used to assign pairing numbers normally considers strength, then FIDE title and then alphabetical order unless the applicable regulations say otherwise. Other formats may create a seed list and distribute those seeds among pools or positions in a knockout structure.

Seeding is therefore the ordering or placement process. A starting rank is the specific position a participant receives in the resulting list.