Slitherine

As I understand it, the results of the Slitherine tournament games are entered into the Elo ranking system, as they are ranked games.

But do the rankings themselves determine the tournament player pairings, or are they driven by the original Swiss system - random pairings for the first round, following rounds by cumulative score totals (player with the highest cumulative score so far is matched with the player with the second-highest score, then #3 with #4, and so on down the line)?

A friend and I were discussing the results of his four games in the first rounds of the current Ancients and Medieval tournaments - he lost all four, having been matched with two opponents with higher Elo rankings.

Were these just unfortunate random pairings from the Swiss system, or were the Elo rankings before the start of the tournaments a factor?

The Elo rankings are not used to seed the tournament.

The first round pairings are entirely random. Subsequent rounds are drawn in order of scores in the current tournament.

Thanks for the clarification.