  In each round of a Swiss-system tournament, players of similar score are
paired against each other. An intentional early loss therefore might lead to
weaker opponents in later rounds and thus to a better final tournament result -
a phenomenon known as the Swiss Gambit. To the best of our knowledge it is an
open question whether this strategy can actually work.
  This paper provides answers based on an empirical agent-based analysis for
the most prominent application area of the Swiss-system format, namely chess
tournaments. We simulate realistic tournaments by employing the official FIDE
pairing system for computing the player pairings in each round. We show that
even though gambits are widely possible in Swiss-system chess tournaments,
profiting from them requires a high degree of predictability of match results.
Moreover, even if a Swiss Gambit succeeds, the obtained improvement in the
final ranking is limited. Our experiments prove that counting on a Swiss Gambit
is indeed a lot more of a risky gambit than a reliable strategy to improve the
final rank.
