  Chess championships are often organised as a Swiss-system tournament, causing
great challenges in ranking the participants due to the different strength of
schedules and possible circular triads. The paper suggests that pairwise
comparison matrices perform well in similar ranking problems. Some features of
the proposed method are illustrated by the results of the 18th European Team
Chess Championship. The analysis is able to take into account the influence of
different opponents and robust with respect to the scaling technique chosen.
The method is simple to compute as a solution of a linear equation system.
