Chess tournament FAQ

A full-point bye is what the pairing gives the odd player left over when the field is odd; in most club events it is worth a whole point, though the organiser may set it lower by announcing that in advance. A half-point bye is requested beforehand by a player who cannot attend a round. A zero-point bye scores nothing and usually follows a withdrawal or an unexplained absence.

Record the withdrawal before the next round is paired. Points already scored stand and the player normally stays in the final standings; they are simply skipped from then on. Their scheduled opponent receives either a bye or a forfeit win, never both, because every pairing must still account for exactly one point.

Bughouse is played by teams of two, so decide first whether teams are fixed or drawn at random. Fixed pairs are commonly seeded and paired exactly like single players in a Swiss or a knockout. A random-partner scramble redraws partners each round and scores individuals instead. Either way each match produces one result: the team that mates first wins.

Cumulative adds up your running score after every round. A player who won early carries that point into every later total, so the tiebreak rewards leading from the front rather than climbing late. Under US Chess conventions a full-point bye or unplayed win is deducted at one point, and a half-point bye at half a point.

Play a tiebreak rather than leaving the match unresolved. The realistic club answer is two blitz games, say five minutes plus a two-second increment, followed by an Armageddon game if the players are still level. That fits comfortably inside twenty minutes. Advancing the higher seed is legitimate only if you announced it before round one.

Not strictly, but you will regret running without one. A single slow game holds up the entire round and your schedule collapses behind it. Aim for one clock per board. If you are short, borrow some, ask players to bring their own, and put the clocks you have on the top boards and the games running long.

Pair the field as normal and give the player left over a bye. In a Swiss that is the lowest-ranked player in the lowest score group who has not already had one. In a round robin, add a ghost player to the schedule so whoever faces the ghost sits out that round. A willing house player is the neatest fix of all.

They should not. The usual convention is that a full-point bye goes to the lowest-ranked player in the lowest score group who has not yet had one, so byes rotate naturally through the field. If your numbers stay odd week after week, adopt a house rule such as no byes in consecutive rounds and announce it before round one.

Nobody is knocked out and everybody plays every round. Round one splits the rating list in half and pairs the top half against the bottom half. From then on you are paired against someone on the same score as you, so winners meet winners and losers meet losers. You never face the same opponent twice, and colours are balanced as far as possible.

Take the base-2 logarithm of your field size and round up: three rounds for up to eight players, four for up to sixteen, five for up to thirty-two, six for up to sixty-four. Treat that as a guideline rather than a rule. It assumes no draws, and it limits perfect scores to one without guaranteeing a single clear winner.

Below about ten players, run a round robin: everyone plays everyone and there is no pairing logic to explain. Above that, run a Swiss, which fits a fixed number of evenings and eliminates nobody. Choose a knockout only when the drama of a bracket matters more than games played, because half your field goes home after one round.

Budget the worst case rather than the average. A game can run to roughly twice the per-player time, so a round at fifteen minutes plus a five-second increment takes about forty minutes plus a changeover. Five such rounds fill an afternoon. Five rounds at ninety minutes plus thirty seconds need a three-day weekend.

Yes, and at club level it usually does. Enough rounds can reduce the number of perfect scores to one, but two players can still finish level below a perfect score and no round count prevents that. Publish a tiebreak order before round one, and split cash prizes evenly rather than letting a tiebreak decide money.

Buchholz is the most common Swiss tiebreak: add together the final scores of every opponent you played. The reasoning is that beating a tough field should count for more than beating a soft one. FIDE events conventionally use the Cut-1 variant, which discards the weakest opponent first. Buchholz should not be used in a round robin, where everyone meets the same opposition.

Sonneborn-Berger weights each opponent by your result against them: their full final score for a win, half of it for a draw, nothing for a loss. It is the standard tiebreak for round robins, where every player has faced the same opposition and plain Buchholz would hand out identical numbers to everyone in the event.

The pairing tries first to equalise the colours you have had across the event, and second to alternate from your last game. Both goals rank below pairing you against someone on your score, which is why streaks happen. Three of the same colour in a row is barred, and unplayed games such as byes and forfeits are skipped when colour history is worked out.

Not unless it becomes mathematically unavoidable, which happens only when the number of rounds is high relative to the size of the field. Avoiding a rematch is the highest-priority rule in both the FIDE and the US Chess pairing rules. Keep your player count comfortably above your round count and the situation will not arise.

Once the forfeit time you announced has passed, the player who did turn up wins the game. There is no universal figure. US Chess defaults to one hour when the organiser says nothing, and many clubs shorten that considerably, while FIDE defaults to zero unless the regulations specify a tolerance. Print whatever you choose on the pairing sheet.

One board, set and clock for every two players, plus a couple of spares for breakages and late entrants. Add pairing sheets, result slips, pens and somewhere to post the standings. Many clubs ask players to bring their own set and clock, which brings the equipment budget down to almost nothing.

Not for an unrated club, school or casual event. Anyone can organise one and there is no qualification you are quietly missing. Certification and affiliation with your national federation matter only when you want results officially rated, since the federation has to accept your report. Knowing the rules well is the real requirement.

You need an affiliated organiser, players who hold current federation membership, a time control inside the rated bands, and a rating report submitted after the event. US Chess takes submissions through its own system for a small per-game fee, and FIDE-rated events additionally require an endorsed pairing program. Check your federation for current fees and deadlines.

With an even number of players you need one round fewer than the number of players. With an odd number you need as many rounds as there are players, because somebody sits out each round. The total number of games is N times N minus one, divided by two, which is why clubs switch to a Swiss around eleven or twelve entrants.

Pool the tied prizes and divide them evenly. If first pays two hundred and second pays one hundred, two players tied for first share three hundred and take one hundred and fifty each. Tiebreaks should decide only what cannot be cut in half: trophies, titles, qualifying places and board order. Announce this in advance and prize arguments mostly disappear.

A quad ranks the entrants by rating, cuts them into groups of four, and runs a three-round round robin inside each group. Everybody gets three games against players of a similar standard, every group finishes at roughly the same time, and there are no pairing decisions to explain to anybody. It is a popular shape for a single-day club event.

Chess Caddy is a free chess tournament manager that runs in your web browser. It pairs Swiss, round robin, single-elimination knockout and Bughouse events, tracks results and standings, applies tiebreaks, handles byes, forfeits and withdrawals, and prints pairing sheets and wall charts. It loads once and then works offline on a phone, tablet or laptop.

Yes. There are no adverts, no subscription, no premium tier and no per-event charge, and nothing is held back behind a paywall: every format, tiebreak and printout is available to everybody. The site does run Google Analytics, so we describe it as ad-free rather than claiming that nothing at all is measured.

No. There is no account, no login and no email address to hand over. You open the page and start a tournament. The trade-off is that nothing can be recovered for you, because we hold no record of you or your event, so export a backup file as you go and keep it somewhere safe.

Yes. It loads once and then runs entirely inside your browser, so it keeps pairing and scoring when the venue Wi-Fi drops out or your phone loses signal halfway through a round. There is no server behind it, which also means nothing about your event is uploaded anywhere while you are running it.

Your tournament lives in your own browser storage, with a second automatic backup copy and an undo stack you can step back through using the Undo button, Ctrl+Z or Cmd+Z during a session. The honest risk is that clearing browsing data or working in private mode erases everything, so export a backup file after each round.

Yes. Export the tournament as a JSON file, get that file across to the other device however suits you, and import it there. Because there is no server and no account, the file is the only link between devices and nothing syncs by itself. The same export doubles as your backup, so make one every round.

Yes. It prints pairing sheets showing the board number, White, Black and a blank box for the result, plus standings wall charts for posting up in the room. Both use a proper print layout rather than a screenshot of the screen, so they come out readable on ordinary paper from a phone, tablet or laptop.

On a phone or tablet the share button opens your native share sheet and sends the standings or pairings as plain text, which suits a club WhatsApp group or an email. On a desktop the same button copies that text to your clipboard. There is no public results link, because there is no server to host one.

It runs Swiss, round robin, single-elimination knockout and Bughouse, the last with either fixed teams or a random-partner scramble. Three tiebreaks are available: Buchholz, Sonneborn-Berger and Cumulative. There is no Cut-1 variant and no head-to-head. Our Buchholz excludes forfeited games entirely, which matches neither the FIDE nor the US Chess treatment.

Yes, in Swiss events. You can swap two players, flip the colours on a board or move the bye, provided no results have been entered yet for the latest round, and you are warned if a change would create a rematch. Manual overrides are not available in round robin, knockout or Bughouse events.

No, and we would rather say so plainly. Chess Caddy uses a deliberately simplified Swiss rather than FIDE’s Dutch algorithm, and it holds no FIDE approval, certification or compliance of any kind. It also produces no US Chess or FIDE rating submission files. It is built for unrated club, school and casual events, which is most of them.

Chess Caddy works in any mobile browser, and the mobile layout keeps a sticky bar on screen showing your next step so you are not hunting for buttons mid-round. There is also a native iOS app in the App Store. The Android version is in closed testing at the moment, so there is no public listing to download yet.