Tournament Operations

This guide is for admins and arbiters who prepare and run tournaments in ChessMint.

Operator Roles

Admins can manage the full tournament setup. Arbiters can operate tournaments they are assigned to.

Before a tournament is used for a real event, check:

The tournament has the right admins or arbiters assigned.
Payment work is handled by an admin or treasurer.
Public sharing settings are reviewed before links are sent.
The tournament status matches the work you are trying to do.

Tournament Structure

A tournament is built in layers:

Layer	Use it for
Tournament	Overall event name, dates, venue, description, sharing, and operators.
Section	Player groups such as Open, U18, Women, or separate rating bands.
Stage	A phase of play, such as Swiss rounds, round-robin groups, knockout, finals, or matches.
Pool	Optional subdivisions inside a stage, for example Group A and Group B.
Round	The playable round with pairings, boards, games, results, and standings updates.

Keep the structure simple unless the event really needs multiple sections, stages, or pools. A clean setup is easier to explain to players and easier to operate during the event.

For team competitions where teams of players compete board-by-board, see Team Tournaments.

Tournament Lifecycle

Tournament status controls which actions are available.

Status	What operators do
Draft	Build the tournament, sections, stages, pools, fees, participants, and public settings. Pairings and results are not available yet.
Published	Registration and preparation are active. The main structure is locked, but participants and pool organization can still be managed.
In Progress	Generate rounds, publish pairings, enter results, handle byes or withdrawals, and follow standings.
Completed	Review final standings, reports, exports, and archive-ready records. Tournament data is read-only for normal operations.
Cancelled	Keep the tournament for records when the event will not take place.

If an action is missing, first check the tournament status. Many actions are intentionally hidden or locked outside the right phase.

Draft Setup

Use draft status to prepare the tournament before announcing it.

Set up:

Tournament name, dates, venue, and description.
Sections and any rating or age grouping your club uses.
Stages, format, time control, scoring, and tiebreak preferences.
Pools if the event uses groups.
Participant list or public signup settings.
Registration fees if fees are tracked.
Arbiters who should operate the tournament.

Before publishing, review the structure with the arbiter. Publishing locks the main section and stage structure, so it is better to catch mistakes while the tournament is still a draft.

Publishing and Registration

Publish the tournament when the structure is ready and registration can begin.

In published status, operators can still:

Add and remove participants.
Review participant status.
Edit registration fees for individual participants.
Add, rename, and assign pools as an organizational step.
Review public sharing and signup settings.

Be careful when changing dates or public information after publishing. Players may already have seen the event details or registered.

Tournament Notifications

Each tournament has its own switches for the notifications it sends to players. They are in the tournament overview, in edit mode.

The two registration switches follow the route the player came in through, not the individual message. That is the one thing you always know about a registration, and each switch covers every notification on its route.

Switch	Default	What it covers
Round notification	Off	A round is published. Each paired player gets their board, colour, and opponent; bye players get a bye notice.
Public registration	On	Everything sent to a player who signed up through the public page: the acknowledgement that the request arrived, the accepted, completed, or declined outcome, a withdrawal, and a waiting-list promotion.
Internal registration	On	Everything sent to a player you entered yourself: the invitation, and that same player's later outcome, withdrawal, and promotion notices.

Notes:

Round notification is off by default, so nothing is sent until you turn it on. Both registration switches are on, so a tournament keeps behaving the way it always has unless you switch one off.
Round notification can also be set per stage. Use that when one stage plays much faster than the rest of the section — a blitz playoff would otherwise send a message every few minutes.
There is no separate switch for the signup acknowledgement. Turning off Public registration silences the whole public route, acknowledgement included — that pairing is deliberate, because a player who signed up and hears nothing back should not then receive the outcome either.
Players have their own setting per kind of notification. Both have to allow it: a player who opted out receives nothing even when your switch is on, and you cannot override that.
Switching something off stops it from that moment. It does not recall anything already sent.

Starting the Tournament

Start the tournament when the event is ready for play.

Before starting, check:

The participant list is correct.
Sections and pools are ready.
Players who should not be paired are not active participants.
Time control, scoring, and tiebreak settings are correct.
Public sharing settings match what players should see.
Round-notification settings match the event plan.

Once the tournament is in progress, the focus moves from setup to round operations.

Round Operations

For each round:

Generate or prepare the pairings.
Review boards, colors, byes, and visible player information.
Publish the round when players should see it.
Enter results as games finish.
Finalize or complete the round when all results are correct.
Review standings before moving to the next round.

If round notifications are enabled, publishing a round sends each paired player their board, colour, and opponent. Bye players receive a bye notice.

Generating and clearing pairings

Generating pairings for a round that already holds some only fills the gaps. It never replaces boards that are already there, so running it again after a bad pairing run leaves the boards you wanted to get rid of exactly where they were.

To start over, use Delete Pairings in the round menu. It removes every pairing of that round and keeps the round itself, so you can generate again from scratch. It asks for confirmation and cannot be undone.

The action is only available on a draft round: a published round is already on the wall in the hall, and a completed one feeds the standings. If you really need to re-pair a later round, revert it to draft first. Admins and arbiters can use it; the round menu it lives in is part of the desktop layout.

Team rounds are not covered — their boards come from the team line-ups rather than from individual pairings.

Pre-Round Check-in

Some events need to know who is actually in the hall before pairing a round — weekend opens with no-shows, rapid events where an unpaired absentee wastes a board, junior tournaments where attendance is confirmed at the door.

Check-in is switched on per stage, in the stage's advanced options. When it is off, nothing changes: this is invisible for the events that do not need it.

With it on, each round gains a check-in sheet:

One present/absent switch per player, with a running count.
Check in everyone and Clear all check-ins for the common case at a check-in desk, where people arrive in groups.
A name search once the field is larger than a handful.

When you then generate pairings for that round, only the players who checked in are paired. Nobody is quietly dropped — the round refuses to pair at all if nobody has checked in, rather than producing an empty round that looks like a pairing failure.

Two things to know:

Check-in is per round, not per tournament. Being present for round 3 says nothing about round 4. This is deliberate: attendance is exactly the thing that changes between rounds.
Check-in is not a registration status. A player who does not show up is still a paid-up participant, and their payment record is untouched.

Once a round is published its check-in sheet is frozen. You can still read it — who was present is worth being able to look up afterwards — but not change it.

Pairing Controls for Difficult Fields

Three settings for events the standard pairing rules do not quite fit. All three sit outside the pairing system: none of them changes how ChessMint pairs, only what it is allowed to pair or where the game is played.

Accelerated opening rounds

In a large open — a field far wider than the number of rounds — the top seeds spend the first rounds beating players hundreds of points weaker, and the system cannot separate the leaders in time.

Set Accelerated opening rounds on a Swiss stage's advanced options. The top quarter of the field by starting rank receives a virtual point for that many opening rounds, so they meet each other sooner.

The virtual point is only ever given to the pairing engine. It never appears in a standing, a score, or a result — the final ranking is the real scores, unchanged. Set it to 0 to turn acceleration off.

Swiss only: the other formats' schedules are fixed, so there is no opening phase to accelerate through.

Forbidden pairs

Two players who must never be paired: siblings, a coach and their pupil, a conflict you know about and the rating list does not.

Open Forbidden pairs on a Swiss stage, pick the two players, and optionally note why. The reason is for you and your fellow arbiters — it is never shown publicly.

Worth knowing:

It is absolute, not a preference. The pair will not be paired, even if that makes the rest of the round less tidy.
It applies to the stage, so a restriction in the main Swiss does not follow the players into a side event.
It follows the people, not the registration. Cancelling and re-entering a player does not lose the rule.
A round-robin or knockout stage refuses it. In those formats every entrant meets every other by definition, so the rule cannot be honoured — and ChessMint says so rather than producing a schedule that breaks it.
If the rules leave someone with nobody to play, pairing stops and names that player, instead of quietly pairing them anyway.

Fixed boards

A player can be pinned to a board: the accessible table, the broadcast board, a seat where a parent can see a junior.

Set Fixed board when editing a participant. Leave it empty for no fixed board. The other games fill the boards around it, keeping their order.

ChessMint refuses rather than guessing when two games want the same board, when the two players of one game want different boards, or when the board does not exist in that round. Honouring one request and dropping the other silently would leave you believing both were applied.

Why This Pairing?

Swiss rounds carry a small marker on the boards where the pairing system had a decision to make: a colour preference that had to be weighed, a score group that had to be crossed, an opponent that had to be avoided, or a bye that had to go to someone. Select the marker and you get that board's reasons in plain language, which is what you need when a player brings the question to your table.

Boards with nothing unusual carry no marker, so the marker itself means there is something worth reading.

It appears on Swiss stages only. A round robin, a match, or a knockout fixes every board, colour, and bye before a game is played, so there is no pairing decision to explain — and a warning about a rule that was never in play would only mislead.

Colour and Float History

The history button on a Swiss stage's rounds shows one row per player: the colour they had each round, which rounds they floated up or down, their White−Black balance, and their byes.

It exists for the conversation that happens at the arbiter's table — "I have had White three times" — and the rows arrive with the largest colour imbalance first, because that is the row the question is usually about. A float is measured against the standing that produced the pairing, so it reflects what the pairing system saw.

Scorecards

Scorecards are printable scoresheets that players use to record their games. In tournaments without electronic boards, the printed scoresheet is the official record of the game. ChessMint fills a card design with your tournament details — name, venue, and club logo — and produces a ready-to-print PDF.

To generate scorecards:

Open the tournament and select Scorecards.
Choose a card design.
Generate the PDF. The tournament header is filled in automatically; players complete the game details by hand.
Print it and hand out one scoresheet per game as needed.

Scorecards cover the whole tournament, so you do not choose a section or stage. Admins and treasurers can generate scorecards.

Tablecards

Tablecards are printable A4 or letter-sized cards that show the tournament name and board number for each table, ready to place on the boards.

To generate tablecards:

Open the tournament, choose a section and stage that already has pairings, and select Tablecards.
Choose a card design.
Generate the PDF. ChessMint creates one card per active board (byes are skipped), using the board numbers from the latest round.
Print it and place one card on each table.

Admins and treasurers can generate tablecards.

Results and Standings

Enter results from the official scoresheets or arbiter record. Standings depend on the tournament configuration, so review them after every completed round.

Check:

Every game has the correct result.
Byes and forfeits are recorded correctly.
Withdrawn or absent players are handled before the next pairing.
Public standings are ready before directing players to the page.

Completing or Cancelling

Complete the tournament only after all rounds and results are final. Completed tournaments remain available for records, reports, standings, and exports.

Cancel a tournament when it will not take place. A cancelled tournament remains visible for internal records, but the play workflow stops.

Operator Checklist

Status matches the current event phase.
Admins and assigned arbiters can access the tournament.
Sections, stages, pools, time controls, scoring, and tiebreaks are correct.
Participant status is clean before pairings.
Payment responsibilities are clear.
Public pages show only information that is ready for players.
Final standings are checked before completion.