The chess world generally works different from the more typical 1/8, 2/7, 3/6, 4/5 knockout tournament. The chess world works via the "swiss" system, which strives to be more fair to each participant, while still preserving the ideal 1 vs 2 final round. The swiss system, in the above example, would be 1/5, 2/6, 3/7, 4/8.
The reason it is considered more fair to each participant is best explained in an example. Let's assign some ratings to #1-#8.
1: 2000
2: 1900
3: 1800
4: 1700
5: 1600
6: 1500
7: 1400
8: 1300
In the swiss system, the boards all have an equal rating difference of 400 pts. In the 1/8, 2/7 system, the boards have a variable rating difference, which is biased strongly towards the #1, and to a certain extent #2, and so on.
The swiss system takes it even further, in that after the first round, players with the same number of points are paired against each other. So, here are some example pairings.
Round 1
1 vs 5
2 vs 6
3 vs 7
4 vs 8
If there were no upsets in round 1, then round 2 looks like this:
Round 2
1 vs 3
2 vs 4
5 vs 7
6 vs 8
And again if there are no upsets in round 2, then the last round looks like this:
Round 3
1 vs 2
3 vs 4
5 vs 6
7 vs 8
Is it just me or does the way Chess.com match up the seedings seem wrong? I don't know how it is in the chess world, so pardon me if I'm totally ignorant here, but in the sports world (for the most part), you have the highest ranked team play the lowest ranked team for each round.
There's a tournament that I'm in, where we are on our 3rd round of matches and one particular player had a "bye" in both the 2nd and 3rd rounds, and he is ranked in the middle. Shouldn't it be the highest ranked player with the bye if there's an uneven number of players?
If there's 8 players in a tournament, then:
#1 plays #8
#2 plays #7
#3 plays #6
#4 plays #5
This way, you'll ideally have #1 vs #2 in the last match of the tournament.