The FFE Plugin
Dependencies: Accelerated pairings
The FFE plugin provides functionality that’s useful for running tournaments associated with the French Chess Federation (the Fédération Française des Échecs).
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.
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
Why do the player rankings not match between the online and the local FFE databases?
There is indeed a difference between the types of rankings (FIDE, national and estimated) in the two federal databases (see below).
This problem has existed for several years (it has been reported to the FFE several times but has never been fixed). Unlike Papi, Sharly Chess displays the observed differences before applying them, which is why arbiters are only now discovering this problem.
In practice, it is advisable to refer to the online FFE database and only use the local FFE database as a backup (when the FFE database is not available or there is no internet connection).
How do we upload results to the FFE website?
Once the plugin is activated, results can be uploaded thanks to the Upload tab (left panel):
Automatic upload can be enabled for each tournament for which FFE credentials have been entered:
The default tournament configuration is done at the event level:
