Getting started with club tournaments

Groups and tournaments

ChessLivo runs tournaments for chess clubs, school teams and student groups. Pairings follow the FIDE rules, and every finalized tournament of a group updates its players' ratings.

• A group is your club or student group: its players, its organizers and its tournaments. Players need no account; you keep their names, nicknames and ratings.
• A group tournament is played by the group's players. Once it is finalized it changes their group ratings in its time control.
• An ad-hoc tournament needs no group: you type the players' names. It is unrated and only you see it, unless you make it public. See Ad-hoc tournaments.
• Everyone who helps run a group has an account: the owner, admins and arbiters. See Co-organizers.

Create an account

How you get an account depends on whether sign-up is open at the moment:

1. If the sign-in page offers Create an account, sign up there and confirm your address from the email we send you.
2. Otherwise accounts come with a club invitation: ask the owner or an admin of your club to invite you, open the link in the email, choose Create an account with the address the invitation was sent to, confirm it, then press Accept invitation.
3. To start a club of your own while sign-up is closed, write to us through the contact form with the topic Club access request. We will get back to you.

Once you have an account, sign in. The club pages work once your email address is confirmed.

Create a group

1. Open My groups and press New group.
2. Enter the Group name, for example "Bilkent University".
3. Enter a Short name (URL): 3–40 letters, digits, "_" or "-". It becomes the group's web address and is unique on ChessLivo.
4. Tick Public group if everyone may see the group's published tournaments and its players' nicknames. You can change this later in the group's Settings.
5. Press Create group. You are its owner.

You can own up to 10 groups at a time.

The checklist

While a group is new, its Players and Tournaments tabs show a getting-started checklist to the owner and the admins. Each step ticks itself when it is done, and the checklist disappears after the last one:

1. Add at least 3 players (anonymized players do not count).
2. Create a tournament.
3. Pair a schedule (round robin) or a first round (Swiss).
4. Publish a round.
5. Finalize a tournament.

Each open step links to the page where you do it.

Choose a format

On the group's Tournaments tab, New tournament offers four formats:

• Individual round robin: everyone plays everyone, once or twice; 3 to 16 players. All rounds are paired at once from the FIDE Berger tables. See Run a round robin tournament.
• Individual Swiss: 4 to 200 players and 3 to 15 rounds. Each round is paired by the FIDE Dutch system once the previous round is complete. See Run a Swiss tournament.
• Team round robin and Team Swiss: teams of 2 to 10 boards. See Run a team tournament.

Choose the Time control too: Standard, Rapid or Blitz. Players are seeded by their rating in it, and a finalized group tournament changes the ratings of that time control.

Next steps

• Manage a group and its players: players, nicknames, full names.
• Co-organizers: invite admins and arbiters.
• Results, finalizing and ratings: enter results, finalize, rating changes.
• Public pages, printing and TRF export: what visitors see, printing, TRF files.