The FFE Plugin

The FFE plugin provides functionality that’s useful for running tournaments associated with the French Chess Federation (the Fédération Française des Échecs).

The FFE plugin is automatically activated for tournaments of federation “FRA”.

Enabling the plugin adds a number of a features to Sharly Chess:

• The ability to define the tournament’s FFE certification number and password.
• Automatic upload the tournament results to the FFE site.
• Uploading of the tournament results to the FFE site.
• Import and export of PAPI files.
• Player search from the online database provided by the FFE.
• Downloading and local search of the player database provided by the FFE.
• Extra player information including the player’s FFE number and license status, and their league.
• Rating estimation for unrated players based on the FFE rules.
• Age categories are updated on 1 September (instead of 1 January). Calculation is still based on the player’s age as of 1 January of the current year.
• Easy access to actions on the FFE website: submitting regulations, managing tournament visibility, and downloading fees.
• FFE specific tie-breaks calculations for compatibility with Papi and the tie-break calculations that are displayed on the FFE site.
• Extra prize criteria for leagues.
• Generating FFE forms needed to manage French tournaments.
• Rule sets for the French team competitions, with their roster rules and the Loubatière pairing sheet.

Team competitions

For team events, the FFE plugin adds rule sets for the official French team competitions. Selecting one on a team tournament applies its roster rules and scoring:

• Jean-Claude Loubatière Cup — a 4-board team cup. Roster capped at 5 players, each rated ≤ 1800 Elo (flagged as a warning), with a mixed Swiss / Molter / round-robin schedule. A game lost by forfeit costs −1 game point, although a match score never goes below zero.
• FFE Women championship (N1F / N2F) — the same 4-board format and 5-player roster, but with no Elo cap; instead the roster must consist of women players only (a warning if not).
• Mixed Cup (Coupe de la Parité) — each match fields 2 men and 2 women; the roster holds up to 6 players (max 3 of each), with the team’s Elo capped at 8000.

Loubatière pairing sheet

When a team tournament uses the Jean-Claude Loubatière Cup rule set, the plugin adds the Loubatière pairing sheet document — one page per team, laid out as the FFE’s fiche d’appariement for the arbiter to fill in.

Sending team competitions to the FFE website

Team tournaments are not sent to the FFE website as a Papi file, but through the site’s team module: Sharly Chess logs in with the group account, registers the tournament’s teams, and fills in one match report per match and round with the players’ licence numbers, the results and the adjusted scores. Reports that no longer match a pairing are removed, the standings are recomputed on the site and each team’s place is set to its Sharly Chess rank. The reports are saved as visible.

To set it up, open the tournament’s properties and fill in the FFE section:

The lists are fetched from the FFE website once the credentials are accepted.

The results are then uploaded from the Upload tab, or automatically, as for individual tournaments. The other actions on the FFE website (regulations, visibility, fees) do not apply to team tournaments. Once configured, the tournament card links to the group’s page on the FFE website.

Every player must have an FFE licence number and every team must have players: otherwise the tournament is shown as Incompatible, and its tooltip explains why.

On Molter rounds, the site expects one report per pair of teams: Sharly Chess splits each round accordingly, spreads a team’s forfeit penalty over its reports so that none goes below zero, and posts no match points, as the cup ranks Molter phases on game points only.

Exporting team tournaments to Papi

Team tournaments can also be exported to a Papi file. As the Papi format has no team play, the file describes an individual Swiss tournament, where each board is a game of its own and the players are ranked on their game points. The teams, the match points and the bonus / penalty points are left out, and a roster player who was not fielded in a round gets a zero-point bye.

Tournament Display on the FFE Website

Tournament displays in Sharly Chess and on the FFE website may differ:

• Sharly Chess saves board numbers during round pairing and subsequent manual pairings, while the FFE website calculates board numbers each time the tournament is displayed; therefore, the board numbers and order may differ.
• Sharly Chess uses player pairing numbers to create acceleration groups, while the FFE website uses Elo rating thresholds; therefore, the board numbers, order, and the players’ virtual points displayed may differ.
• Sharly Chess allows the use of all tiebreaks authorized by FIDE (in addition to those of the FFE), but some of these tiebreaks cannot be displayed on the FFE website.

In all cases, the ranking displayed by Sharly Chess and on the FFE website are exactly the same.

Frequently Asked Questions