IIHF Adopts Balanced Pools For World Championship

After many years of playing with the top teams in the world in Group A of the women's IIHF World Championships, and the second tier of teams in Group B, the IIHF has decided to abandon that format in favor of the more traditional snake format.

Beginning in the 2025-2025 season, the IIHF World Championships will feature two evenly ranked pools of teams for the competition.

"The flagship competition will continue with 10 teams, but the two groups will be established using “snake seeding” to create two sections of equal rank," the IIHF wrote following their semi-annual congress held in Greece.

The IIHF U-18 World Championships recently adopted this format as well.

The new pools, which will feature five teams each, will send four teams to the playoff round, with the last place team from each pool play a relegation game.

Were this format in practice today, the pools for the upcoming World Championship in Czechia could look like a pool of Canada, Czechia, Switzerland, Japan, and Norway, and a pool consisting of USA, Finland, Germany, Sweden, Hungary.

For years the only crossover opportunity between teams from pools occurred in quarterfinal games.

This year the Women's Euro Hockey Tour has developed more competition among European and North American nations featuring tournaments involving Sweden, Switzerland, Finland, and Czechia, with periodic involvement from Germany, and national development teams from Canada and USA.

The new format also appears to reduce the relegation and promotion to one team moving up, and one moving down each year, which will also reduce the disparity between teams.

View the original article to see embedded media.