The Evaluation of Tournament Outcomes

This paper by the noted German mathematician Ernst Zermelo (1871–1953) was long overlooked and was brought to the attention of the statistical community only in the mid-1960s, by John Moon and Leo Moser, professors of mathematics at the University of Alberta, Canada. Zermelo is concerned with the evaluation of players in chess tournaments, especially for tournaments lacking the balance of Round Robins, where all pairs of players meet equally often. There had long been an obvious method for dealing with Round Robins, namely to rank players according to their number of wins (counting draws as half-wins).