Managing Tournaments
Creating a Tournament
Once you’ve created an Event, you can add one or more Tournaments to it. From the navigation menu, click Tournaments to open the Tournaments page, then click the Create Tournament button.
Properties
| Name | A user-friendly name used for display purposes (e.g. on Screens). |
| Rounds | The number of rounds in the tournament. |
| Players per team | Team events only. The number of boards each team fields. |
| Rating | The rating type of the tournament — Standard, Rapid, or Blitz. |
| Rating to use | Specifies if tournaments will use FIDE or national ratings. |
| Dates | The tournament’s start and end dates (overrides the event-level values). |
| Location | The location of the tournament (overrides the event-level value). |
Unrated Players
| Seeding of unrated rapid/blitz | See the FAQ entry for details. |
Pairings
| Pairing system | Choose the tournament’s pairing system. In a team event these are the team pairing systems instead of swiss / round-robin. |
| Pairing variation | Allow you to choose variants of the pairing system. Some variations (for example the knock-out ones) add their own settings below this field. |
| First board number | The first board number to use for pairings of this tournament. |
| Max byes | The maximum number of byes a player may request. |
| Nb. final rounds without byes | Number of final rounds in which byes are not permitted. |
Time Control
You can define the time control for the tournament. This will be added to the TRF export.
Rules
| Rules file location | A link to the tournament rules document. |
| Illegal move recording | Enables tracking of illegal moves per player. You can define a maximum here. |
| Point counting | Choose between the standard 1-0.5-0 point system or the 3-1-0 system. |
| Value of the pairing allocated bye | The number of points awarded to a player receiving a pairing allocated bye |
| Drop players that completed less than 50% of their games (FIDE 6.6) | Round-robins only. A player (or team) who withdrew or was expelled having completed less than half of their games is not ranked, and their games are annulled: they no longer count in the opponents’ scores and tie-breaks. |
Criteria
The Criteria section describes who is eligible for the tournament: gender, rating range, age category, club and federation. The criteria are not enforced when adding players, but they drive the distribution of players among the tournaments and can fill the player search filters in one click.
Plugins may add extra fields to the tournament form depending on their functionality.
Tournament options
Once you’ve created a tournament it’s displayed on the Tournaments page. Each tournament has a number of options that can be accessed, such as:
- The ability to edit the fields set during creation
- The ability to download it in various formats (including TRF)
- Updating the player information from the latest database versions provided by the FIDE or local federation
- Duplication and deletion
Distributing players among tournaments
The Distribute the players among the tournaments button (on the Tournaments page, and in the Actions menu of the Players page) redistributes all the players of the event among its tournaments in one go, whichever tournament they are currently in. Distribution is only possible in individual events, before any tournament has started, and when all the tournaments use the same rating type (Standard, Rapid or Blitz).
A convenient way to organise registrations is to create a single holding tournament that collects all the entries — manually, from a file or from Sharly-Chess.com — and then to distribute the players among the real sections once registrations are closed. Give the holding tournament 0 players (Descending rating) or leave it unselected (Based on each tournament’s criteria); once empty, it can be deleted.
Two distribution types are available:
| Descending rating | Sort the players by descending rating and choose how many go into each tournament, from the strongest section down. |
| Based on each tournament’s criteria | Allocate each player to the first tournament whose criteria (age category, rating, gender…) they meet. |
With the descending rating type, you can also:
- Define balanced groups — select several tournaments (click and drag) to form a group. The players are dealt to the tournaments of the group one at a time, so that the sections end up with balanced ratings rather than a strongest and a weakest section.
- Separate players from the same club — spread the players of the same club across the balanced tournaments, as much as possible, so that club-mates do not meet.