Sharly Chess 5.1 released

Version 5.1 of Sharly Chess is now available, with the following additions:

• a knock-out pairing system, for individual and team events
• a visual editor for place cards
• application settings and plugins gathered in the main application window
• an administration interface that works on a phone
• FFE team competitions can now be uploaded to the FFE website
• filters for the player search
• club separation when distributing players
• better FIDE compliance for round robins
• numerous other improvements throughout the application

Knock-out tournaments

The biggest addition in version 5.1 is the knock-out (cup) pairing system, for both individual and team events.

Players — or teams — are seeded into a bracket: the loser of each match is out, the winner moves on, and the last one standing wins. The number of rounds follows from the size of the field, the top seeds skip round one when the field is not a power of two, and the ranking is by the round reached: winner, runner-up, third place, out in round N…

Four variations are available:

• Single elimination — one game per match, one loss and you are out.
• Single elimination with two-game matches — each match over two games with colours reversed, decided on aggregate.
• Double elimination — a first loss drops the participant into a lower bracket; a second loss eliminates. The winners of the two brackets meet in a Grand Final, optionally with a reset game if the lower-bracket champion wins it.
• Double elimination with two-game matches.

Because chess games can be drawn, a knock-out needs a way to decide level matches. Sharly Chess 5.1 introduces advancement tie-breaks: the tie-breaks configured on a knock-out tournament do not rank the standings, they decide who goes through — rating, pairing number, games won, performance… — and a Manual tie-break lets the arbiter designate the winner of a play-off (Armageddon, blitz games…) played over the board.

The settings cover what a cup organiser expects: a third-place playoff, the colour assignment rule (alternate colours, higher seed with White, or drawing of lots), and grouped seeding by club, federation or affiliation, so that club-mates play each other first and the two strongest groups can only meet in the final — with a live preview of the resulting bracket.

A new Knock-out Bracket document prints the bracket diagram, or the schedule of matches round by round.

👉 Read the new Knock-out page to get started.

Place card editor

Place cards no longer require editing template files by hand: version 5.1 includes a visual editor.

From the Templates button of the Documents dialog, you can create a new template or duplicate a built-in one, then design it on screen: add text and images, drag them into place, choose fonts, sizes, colours and alignments, and preview the card with sample data. Templates can be imported and exported to share them with other organisers.

The editor writes the same TOML templates as before, so existing custom templates keep working and can still be fine-tuned by hand.

👉 See the Place Cards Customization Guide.

The main application window

The language, federation and date format settings have moved from the browser to the main application window — the window that opens when you launch Sharly Chess — alongside the data folder and update settings.

Plugins are now installed and uninstalled from the same window, from a new Plugins page listing the available plugins with their type, federation, dependencies and documentation.

The event export (SCE) has moved too, from the tournament tab to the event’s configuration window.

👉 See Accessing the User Interface and Plugins.

Administration from a phone

The administration interface now adapts to phone screens: pairings can be checked and results entered from a smartphone in the playing hall.

FFE team competitions

Team competitions — the Jean-Claude Loubatière Cup, the Mixed Cup (Coupe de la Parité), the Women championship (N1F / N2F) and any other competition of the site’s team module — can now be uploaded to the FFE website. Enter the group director’s account in the tournament’s properties, choose the competition, division and group, and Sharly Chess registers the teams and fills in the match reports — players, results and scores — round after round, manually or automatically.

Team tournaments can also be exported to a Papi file, which describes them as an individual Swiss tournament.

👉 See The FFE Plugin.

Player search filters

The player search can now be narrowed by federation, gender, age category and club — plus licence and league for FFE searches. The filters can be filled in one go from the criteria of any tournament of the event, which makes registering players section by section much quicker.

Player distribution

When distributing players across balanced tournaments, players of the same club can now be separated as much as possible. A reminder to update the players’ data from the latest rating lists is shown before distributing them — and before generating place cards.

Round robins

Two improvements for round-robin tournaments:

• the FIDE 6.6 participation rule can be enabled on the tournament: a player (or team) who withdrew or was expelled having completed less than half of their games is dropped from the final standings and their games are annulled;
• in individual round robins, when moving on to the next round, Sharly Chess now asks whether the current round should be marked as completed, and warns you if boards are still without a result.

Miscellaneous

Among the other improvements:

• results entered on an administration pairings screen are now notified immediately to the other administration screens, as results entered on an input screen already were
• the rating difference is now sent to Chess-Results
• team tournaments paired on fixed tables (Molter) print the pairings document in place of the match sheets, and their team ranking now shows the game points and tie-breaks
• the team size limit is enforced when importing players from a CSV file

👉 Check out the full changelog for all the other new features and fixes.

We hope you’ll enjoy this new version. As always, please feel free to share your feedback on Discord, by email at support@sharly-chess.com, or on GitHub.

Update to version 5.1

Sharly Chess 5.0 users will be offered the update automatically; new users can download the latest version from this page.

Support Sharly Chess

You can support the Sharly Chess project by using the Sharly-Chess.com registration platform for your tournaments, or by making a donation to the Sharly Chess association.

A huge thank you to everyone who contributes, provides feedback, helps other users, or supports the project financially: your support helps us keep Sharly Chess free and open source.