Features

This page presents the features of Sharly Chess, a complete chess competition management suite.

Events & tournaments

  • Multiple tournaments per event — group tournaments however you like (for example by rating range) within a single event. See Creating an Event.
  • Individual or team events — each event is one or the other, chosen at creation.
  • Player distribution — bulk-split your player pool across the tournaments in an event.
  • Event categorisation — colour-coded tags to organise your events; pre-configured and customisable.
  • Public & organiser details — location, organiser name, email, director, homepage, plus public-display colours and timer settings.
  • Tournament formats — Swiss, round robin, team Swiss, team round robin, plus fixed-table (Molter) and Scheveningen variations. See Managing Tournaments.
  • Rating cadence & source — Standard / Rapid / Blitz per tournament; FIDE / National / Estimated rating source, with overrides.
  • Round scheduling — per-round dates and times.
  • Manual point adjustments — per-player and per-team bonuses or penalties, each with a reason, folded into standings, tie-breaks and the TRF export.
  • Byes — zero / half / full-point byes, pairing-allocated byes, a maximum-byes cap, and a “no byes in the last N rounds” rule.
  • Check-in — mark players (or teams) present, absent or withdrawn; optionally let them check themselves in. See Check-in Process.
  • Illegal-move recording — with a configurable per-game cap.
  • Statistics — gender, federation, club, category and rating-type counts, plus min / max / average rating.
  • Arbiters — chief, deputy and the aggregated arbiter list.

Pairings

  • FIDE-compliant Swiss — Dutch-system pairings via the BbpPairings engine, with a built-in consistency checker.
  • Round robin & double round robin — all-play-all, singly or twice with reversed colours.
  • Team pairings — team Swiss, team round robin, team double round robin, Scheveningen (standard and double) and Molter tables. See Team pairing systems and Molter tables.
  • Keizer — flexible pairings designed for long-running club tournaments, pairing the players available each round while allowing occasional absences.
  • Accelerated pairings — Baku (FIDE Dutch 2026), Haley, Haley Soft, Progressive, Initial-score and custom schemes.
  • Manual control — pair, unpair, permute and swap by hand at any time. See Managing Pairings.
  • Prohibited pairings — keep players from the same club, federation or team apart; hard rules, or soft rules that relax from the bottom of the field while protecting the top boards.
  • Safety mode — actions are classified as safe, unsafe or FIDE-incompatible and gated according to each round’s status, so you can’t accidentally break a paired round.

Tie-breaks

Every FIDE tie-break is supported, for both individual and team tournaments — Buchholz and its variants, Sonneborn-Berger, Koya, direct encounter, performance ratings, and many more. Cutters (No Cut, Cut-1, Cut-2, Median-1, Median-2) and predefined recommended sets (Sharly Chess and FIDE) are available, and you can build your own sets.

See Team scoring & tie-breaks for the team specifics.

Championships & Circuits

Aggregate rankings from several tournaments or events into an overall standing, for both individual and team championships. A wide range of scoring rules is available — total points, scaled points, position-based points, ranking points with bonus, average points or rank, count of places or wins, tie-break based, and manual. Players are matched automatically across the source tournaments.

See Championships and Championship scoring & tie-breaks.

Prizes

A comprehensive prize-management module:

  • Prize types — monetary, non-monetary, or hybrid (monetary plus a complementary value).
  • Tied-prize sharing — none, average, or the Hort system.
  • Flexible structure — prizes built from reusable player filters (gender, rating, age, rating type, club, federation and more).

See Prize List.

FIDE title norms

Automatic detection and calculation of GM, IM, WGM and WIM norms following the full FIDE 1.4 ruleset — minimum games, federation diversity, title-holder shares, minimum score, rating floors and performance margins. Includes a per-round audit trail for the IT1 report, a subset searcher for permitted game drops, and a what-if forecaster showing the results still needed to chase a norm.

Players & teams

  • Player records — name, date of birth, gender, contact details, federation, club, FIDE ID and fixed-table number, plus amounts owed and paid.
  • Dual title system — open titles (GM/IM/FM/CM) and women’s titles (WGM/WIM/WFM/WCM), shown together where relevant.
  • Ratings — per-cadence ratings with a defined resolution order, plus rating calculations (initial FIDE rating estimate, K-factor, per-round performance and rating change).
  • Player categories — fully configurable per event.
  • Managing players — sortable, filterable table with FIDE search and import-with-diff. See Managing Players.
  • Teams — rosters with size caps and reordering, playing or non-playing captains, team groups, per-round lineups, stable board numbering, team byes, and configurable match-point scoring (e.g. Olympiad 2/1/0). See Team events and Running team rounds.

Screens & public display

Sharly Chess includes a built-in web server offering a full set of screens for public display and result entry.

  • Screen types — check-in, results entry, pairings by board or by player, last results, ranking and cross-table, and images.
  • Rotators — auto-cycling sequences for unattended displays. See Rotators.
  • Menus — see Menus.
  • Display controllers — physical screens you can remotely assign to any screen or rotator. See Display Controllers.
  • Timers — public countdown timers with configurable colours and delays. See Timers.
  • Chess 960 — display start positions to the players.

Documents & printing

A large library of printable documents: player and check-in lists, pairings, round robin schedules, Molter and Scheveningen tables, match sheets, results, individual and team rankings, cross-tables, Berger grids, prize lists and receipts, statistics, norm reports, QR codes and place cards. See Documents for the full list.

Place cards, available for players, boards, pairings and teams, are built from customisable templates, with optional crop marks.

Import, export & data sources

  • Import — full TRF26 support; direct import of events and players from our tournament registration platform; CSV; and federation-specific formats via plugins.
  • Export — TRF26 (FIDE rating report) and PGN; player exports to CSV, ODS, XLSX and vCard.
  • Data sources — look players up in the local FIDE database and, via plugins, federation-specific sources (for example FFE online and local, and French-schools). See Data sources.

Network & access control

Sharly Chess can be accessed by other arbiters over the local network, with fine-grained control over who can do what.

  • Access levels — a ten-level hierarchy from administration down to spectator, scoped to the whole application, an event, or individual tournaments. See Access levels.
  • Staff accounts — Delegate organisational and arbitration tasks. See Staff Accounts.
  • Security — password-protected accounts and session-based access. See Security.

Web interface

One server serves three audiences at once:

  • Public / spectator — live screen, rotator and display-controller views that update in real time.
  • On-site input — result entry and editing, player and team self check-in, and illegal-move recording.
  • Organiser console — full administration of events, tournaments, players, check-in, pairings and results, teams, prizes, championships, screens, timers, accounts and documents.

See Accessing the User Interface.

Plugins & integrations

Sharly Chess can be extended with plugins for national federations and specialised needs. See Plugins.

  • FFE (French federation) — PAPI transfer, player search, results upload, licences, French leagues, tie-breaks, rule sets and arbiter titles.
  • Sharly-Chess.com — two-way sync with our online platform for check-in, players, results and event import. See Sharly-Chess.com.
  • Chess-Results.com — upload your results to the international portal.
  • ChessEvent — download registrations from the French registration platform.
  • French Schools — support for French scholastic tournaments.
  • Handicap Games — stronger players get less time, with per-round clocks derived from the rating difference.
  • Custom Upload — upload generated documents to your own FTP location.

Platform

  • Cross-platform — runs on Windows, macOS and Linux, with a consistent interface across all three.
  • Works offline — no internet connection is required to run a tournament.
  • Auto-update — new releases are detected automatically and can be installed from within Sharly Chess.
  • Multilingual — English and French included, with ISO, EU and US date formats.