How to plan a chess tournament?
If you’re looking to plan a chess tournament and you have no prior experience whatsoever, here is a list of things to consider when planning a chess tournament.
There is a need to understand the type of tournament you are planning to organize. Are you organizing a casual tournament in your community or it is going to be a formal event. This is important because it will help potential participants have an idea of what to expect ahead of the tournament.
Today, we take a look at how to plan a casual, formal and online chess tournament.
How to plan a casual tournament?
For a casual tournament, you should consider asking yourself a few questions before going all out.
- How many people can you reasonably expect?
- How long do you want it to take?
- Where will the venue be?
- When is the date going to be?
These questions will help you plan and decide the tournament format, venue, ideal number of people that will attend the tournament.
Understanding the tournament formats is important, will it be a whole day tournament, only an evening? Are you thinking of blitz, rapid, or standard? If it’s standard, you can only fit a game or two into an evening, but a whole blitz tournament easily goes. The time control that is mostly preferred is 10 minutes per game. So let us discuss the tournament formats. There are several tournament formats but the most common ones are:
- Knock out: This is a single-elimination tournament, also called an Olympic system tournament is a type of tournament where the loser is immediately eliminated from winning the tournament or eliminated totally from the tournament. Opponents are usually allocated at random or based on qualification, just like in the football world cup and the knockout stage of the UEFA champions league. This is the format used in the chess world cup.
- Round robin: In this system every player plays against all the other players at least once in the competition. The overall best player is the player the finishes with the best performance. He or she accumulated more points than any other person throughout the tournament. The most well-known round-robin tournament is the candidates tournament.
- Swiss system: Unlike round-robin, players do not play every single participant at the tournament. It operates in a non-eliminating format with a fixed number of rounds. Players are paired with opponents with the same score and they do not face each other more than once.
To select a venue for a casual tournament, you need to know what size you want, and after this is sorted, you decide the minimum and the maximum number of participants. You can contact a local chess club, they might enjoy helping you out.
How to plan a formal tournament?
For formal tournament organization, there’ll be a need to set up an organizing committee. It is important to assign an individual whose sole responsibility is to oversee all the members of the committee that is involved in organizing the tournament.
This individual may be called the chairman of the organizing committee. He is to select the members of the committee, consult with his committee and appoint a tournament director. The role of members of the organizing committee will be to:
- To draw up a preliminary financial estimate of the funds needed to run the tournament.
- Draw up and adopt the Rules and Regulations for the tournament
- Secure the tournament venue necessary paraphernalia and publicity for the tournament
- Identify the registration centres and announce the deadline for registration
- Settle all organizational problems which may arise during the preparation and in the actual course of the competition
- Draw up a final report at the end of the tournament for submission to the chairman of the organizing committee
The organizing committee assumes responsibility for all the technical and financial matters. The role of the tournament director is to advise the organizing committee on technical matters, this includes but is not limited to tournament system, registration, prizes, tournament site and tournament schedule. The tournament chairman may consult the national or provincial chess federation to appoint someone for this role.
Software to help organize a chess tournament
Regardless of whether you are organizing a casual or formal chess tournament. The following software help to organize chess tournaments:
Swips, Chess manager & Caissachess.
Chessmanager is free. Swips.eu charges a nominal fee and cassiachess.net offers a free trial.
Online Tournaments
Online chess is more popular than ever thanks to shows like The Queen’s Gambit on Netflix. Different chess hosting servers allow people to play chess on the internet. Some popular servers are:
There is numerous tournaments organized on these servers and you can create one yourself too.
Check out Chess is the new hobby for f1 players: The Queen’s Gambit series had a role to play
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