Before you start

You need an account. Ask the association for one - they are given out freely to anybody running an event, because an organiser cannot damage anything. You will get an email address and a temporary password, and the first time you sign in you will be asked to choose your own.

You do not need to know any pairing rules. If a screen ever expects you to know what "Buchholz Cut-1" means before you can carry on, that screen is wrong and you should tell us.

The five stages

An event moves through five stages. Only the last one needs anybody else.

Why it works this way. Rating is the only action that changes the district's shared numbers. Everything else affects one event, whose organiser is accountable for it by name. Putting the gate anywhere earlier would add friction without adding safety.

Setting up an event

Press New event, give it a name, and choose team or individual. After that there are six short steps, and it saves as you go - you can be interrupted by a bell and come back to it.

1. Basics - name, who is running it, the arbiter, the first day.
2. Format - pairing system, number of rounds, boards per team, the clock.
3. Teams - nothing to fill in; it explains the squad rule before you meet it.
4. Schedule - one row per playing day, whether that is six Saturdays of a league or three days in a row at one venue.
5. Tiebreaks - drag them if you care, ignore them if you do not.
6. Review - check it and open the event.

Opening it does not tell anybody. It just lets you start entering clubs and players.

Choosing a format

The one thing worth getting right first time is how many rounds a field can actually play.

If you ask for more rounds than a field can play, the setup screen stops you and offers three ways out: play everyone twice, play a shorter single round robin, or recruit more teams. Recruiting is usually the best answer for the league; playing twice is the easiest to explain to a committee - everyone plays everyone, twice.

The other thing the schedule step works out is roughly when the day will end. A 30-minute game can run a full hour, and with pairing and getting players to the right boards a round costs about seventy minutes - so three rounds is around half past six, not half past five.

This is information, not a rule. A tournament is allowed to finish after the time on the schedule and plenty do; you are the one who knows whether the hall stays open and whether the transport waits. The point is only that you know the finishing time before the date goes out to the clubs, rather than discovering it on the afternoon. If you would rather it finished earlier, 20 minutes a side is rated exactly the same as 30, so shortening the clock costs nothing.

Individual events

Everything so far describes a team event, because that is what the district's first league needed. An individual event is the simpler of the two, and most of the system works the same way.

What changes:

• No clubs, no squads, no boards. You enter players one at a time. There is no strength order to maintain and nothing shifts up when somebody is away.
• One game per player per round instead of a match of several boards. The round screen is a single list of pairings rather than a set of match cards.
• Points instead of match points. A win is 1, a draw is ½. The default tiebreaks are Buchholz Cut-1, Buchholz and Sonneborn-Berger, which are the usual ones for an open.
• Byes belong to a player, not a board. With an odd number of entries somebody sits out each round, and the system hands that around rather than giving it to the same person twice.

Everything else - the result buttons, offline entry, printing, the public page, submitting for rating - is identical. If you can run a league you can run an open.

The three kinds of bye

In an individual event you will meet these on the … menu:

None of them is rated. A bye is not a game.

Swiss, in detail

A round robin is decided before it starts: everyone plays everyone, and the whole fixture list exists from the first day. A Swiss is worked out as it goes - each round is built from the results of the rounds before it, pairing players on the same score against each other so the leaders meet.

That difference has three practical consequences.

1. You must finish a round before you can pair the next one

Round 5 is computed from the standings after round 4. If round 4 still has an empty board, the system will not pair round 5 - it will tell you which round is holding things up. This is not fussiness: pairing off incomplete scores does not fail loudly, it quietly produces a draw that looks perfectly normal and is wrong.

2. Nobody plays the same opponent twice

That is the defining rule, and it is also the ceiling on how many rounds you can play: with n players each has only n−1 possible opponents. Ask for more rounds than that and the setup screen stops you, because there is no legal pairing left to make.

3. Colours even out over the event, not within a round

The engine tries to give everyone a similar number of Whites and Blacks and to avoid three of the same colour in a row, but it will break that preference rather than repeat a pairing. You do not need to manage it.

Where the pairings come from

We do not write our own pairing rules. The system uses bbpPairings, the same engine that sits inside the commercial programs, implementing FIDE's official Swiss pairing rules. If a pairing is ever questioned, the answer points at the FIDE handbook rather than at our code.

The pairing is worked out on your own device, which is why a Swiss round can be paired in a hall with no signal. The exact data that produced it is stored with the round, so the Ratings Officer can re-run it and confirm they get the same answer.

Team Swiss

A team Swiss pairs teams, not players: each team counts as one competitor whose score is its match points and whose strength is the average of the boards it can field. Once the teams are drawn against each other, the boards are filled from each club's squad exactly as in a league, with colours alternating down the boards.

Squads and teams

This section is about team events. In an individual event you simply enter players, and there is nothing here to think about.

A club does not enter a team at a time. It enters one squad - every player it is bringing, in strength order - and the teams come out of that list. (A school is just a club here; so is a company team or a municipality side.)

With four boards and nine players: numbers 1 to 4 are the A team, 5 to 8 are the B team, and number 9 is a reserve. You never assign anyone to a team by hand, and you cannot, which is exactly the point: a B team that is stronger than its own A team becomes impossible rather than merely against the rules.

When someone is away

Before you pair a round, tap anyone who has not arrived. Everyone below them moves up one place in the squad - including across the A/B line.

Two things follow from this. A club cannot weaken its A team by resting a player, because the next player simply steps up. And a shortage always lands on the last board of the last team, never in the middle - with nine players and one absence, both teams are still full.

When the absent player comes back, everyone moves down again, so a player who played A board 4 one week may be in the B team the next. That is a mechanical consequence, not a choice, so it is not blocked - but it is recorded, and the Ratings Officer can see whether one club does it before every big fixture.

Running a round

1. Open the round and mark who is here.
2. Press Pair round. For a round robin this is instant and needs no signal - the fixtures were worked out before the first game was played.
3. Print the pairing sheet for the wall if you want one.
4. Enter results as boards finish.
5. Press Finish round when they are all in.

Once a round is paired its lineup is frozen. If someone leaves after that, mark them absent for the next round - a round that has been played is a fact, and editing it afterwards would quietly change results other people have already seen.

Colours

Colours alternate down the boards, so each team gets an even split in every match.

With an odd number of boards the split cannot be even, so whoever takes the extra white in one round takes the extra black in the next. The system keeps that running total for you.

The result buttons

Three buttons cover almost every board, and they sit between the two players. That is deliberate: whichever button you press, the point goes to the name on that side of it, so you never have to work out which of the two is White before you can record a win.

Each button also says what it means underneath the notation - White won, Draw, Black won. The notation is what an arbiter expects and what the rating file needs; the caption is for the parent who offered to help and has never scored a match. The order of the three flips to match the board, so the first is always a win for the player on the left. The little square beside each name is that player's colour: white square, white pieces. Everything that is not one of the three normal results sits behind the … button so it never slows you down.

A game nobody played never changes a rating. That is the rule the whole list exists to protect. Every non-rated board is labelled on the card so you can see it at a glance.

A board the club could not fill is a forfeit. Use +/– or –/+ for it, the same as for a player who did not arrive - from the other side of the board the two are the same thing, and there is nothing for you to decide between. When a club arrives short the system marks the empty board for you anyway; you will see it as a forfeit on the card.

Standings

Match points first, then game points, then whoever won when the tied teams played each other - unless you chose a different order when you set the event up.

That order locks when round 1 is paired, on purpose. Changing tiebreaks after results exist changes who is winning, and doing that halfway through is how disputes start.

Reading the table

After the score come up to three tiebreak columns, headed TB1, TB2 and TB3, and named in full in a line underneath. That is how every printed crosstable and chess-results itself labels them, for the good reason that "OSB" over a column of numbers explains nothing to the person reading it.

Direct encounter has no column - it is a comparison between two teams, not a number one team has - so it is named in that same line under "also applied". Three is the cut-off: a fourth tiebreak has never separated anyone still level after three, and it costs a column on a phone.

No signal

Open the tournament once while you have signal - at home, at the club, on the way, anywhere. After that the phone holds the whole event, and you can carry on with the connection off.

Results you enter are stored on the phone and sent the moment the signal comes back. The pill at the top of the screen tells you how many are waiting. You can close the browser, or the battery can die; nothing is lost, and nothing is ever sent twice.

If two people enter a different result for the same board, the last one entered stands and both are kept. The Ratings Officer sees any board whose result changed after it was first entered. Disagreements are made visible rather than prevented.

What the public sees

Every event has a page at chrishanichess.co.za/live/<event>. It needs no account and no approval, because a scoreboard carries no risk - rating is the thing that needs a gate.

What goes on it is three separate switches, on Publishing on the round screen (and on the event's overview):

Anything held back is removed on the server, not hidden with a stylesheet. It is not sitting in the page waiting for somebody curious to find it.

Board prizes and statistics

The public page has a Stats tab. Everything on it is worked out from games two people actually played - a forfeit, a bye or an unfilled board counts for the standings and never for a statistic. Nobody should win a board prize because their opponent failed to arrive twice.

Best on each board

The one leagues actually award. Ranked by percentage, and a player must have played at least 60% of the rounds on that board to be in the running. Without a bar like that it goes to whoever played once and won once.

Worked examples: five rounds means three games; seven rounds means five; ten rounds means six. Always rounded up.

Following one team or player

Clicking a name anywhere on the public page opens that competitor's own card: every round they have played, who against, and what it is predicted to do to their rating. A team's card also carries a board by board table - each board down the side, each round across the top - so a captain can read one board's whole season on a single line.

The rest

• Best performances - highest percentage over the same minimum. Where two are level, the one who faced stronger opponents is placed first.
• Biggest upsets - decisive games won by the lower-rated player, largest rating gap first.
• Rating movers - predicted, using the association's own rating engine.
• Tournament facts - games played, how many were drawn, and what White scored. A little over 54% for White is the long-run norm; a big swing either way is worth a look.

Printing

Everything prints from the browser. Choose Print, then "Save as PDF" if you want a file rather than paper. It all works offline, because it is the browser doing the work.

• Pairing sheet for the wall - twelve boards on one A4 page, readable from two metres. Each name carries the points that player has so far, and there is an empty box between the two of them for an arbiter to write the result in by hand.
• Result slips - one per board. The colour is a solid block rather than the word "White", so a young player can read it, and there is one signature line, because one official signs it.
• Standings - the table as it stands, with faint rules between the columns.
• Team cards - each club's boards for that round.

Every sheet carries the association's mark: small at the top, faint behind the content, and a line at the foot saying it was made by the CHCA pairing system.

Colour

Black and white is the default, because that is what a school photocopier does well. Tick Print in colour for a version in the association's own green - used for the masthead rule, the table band and the borders, and nothing else, so it still photocopies to something readable. Your browser also needs Background graphics ticked under "More settings" in its own print dialog, or it will drop the coloured bands.

The choice is remembered, so printing the pairings and then the slips does not mean saying it twice.

Getting it rated

Finish every round, then open Submit. Two things can stop you:

• A round that is not finished.
• A player without a date of birth or a ChessSA ID. ChessSA cannot rate a submission where a player is not clearly identified, and finding out weeks later costs a round trip. There is a one-screen form that fixes all of them in one pass.

After that the Ratings Officer checks it. They can approve it, which updates the district ratings, or send it back with a note, which unlocks it for you. Your results were public the whole time - what changes at approval is the word provisional disappearing.

If something goes wrong

I paired the round and someone arrived late. Use the … button on their board and choose "Change who plays this board". You will be asked why, and the reason goes on the record with the event.

I entered the wrong result. Tap the right one. The change is recorded, and the officer can see it. If the round is finished, reopen it first.

The pairing looks wrong. It very probably is not - round robin uses the published FIDE tables - but the Ratings Officer can re-run the schedule and compare it with what was played. Ask them to check rather than editing it yourself.

A club arrived with three players. Nothing to do. Their bottom board is marked short automatically, which counts for the match and never for a rating.

Something else. Every screen has a ? in the bottom corner that explains that screen. If that does not answer it, contact the association.