Resident player

A Swiss tournament has a fixed number of rounds and generally pairs players on similar scores. The Dutch system of the International Chess Federation, commonly known as FIDE from its French initials, first groups participants by their current score. When it processes one of those groups, it creates a pairing bracket. A resident player is a player from the scoregroup that originally formed that bracket.

The word resident distinguishes that player from a moved-down player, who arrived because no valid pairing was found in the bracket above. Both types may appear in the same bracket, but they have different origins and the algorithm may apply different priorities or constraints to them.

Residents are ranked and temporarily distributed into subgroups while pairings are sought. A pairing transposition changes the order of certain residents; a pairing exchange changes which residents belong to each subgroup. The term describes a role inside the calculation of one round only.