Generating pairings

The Pairings tab is where you run the tournament round by round: generate the pairings, publish them, enter results and complete the round. Chesstide pairs Swiss tournaments with bbpPairings, the reference implementation of the FIDE Dutch system.

The round lifecycle

Pick a round in the round selector; its status drives which buttons appear:

• Draft — pairings exist but players can't see them yet. You can still adjust everything.
• Published — pairings are public; result entry is open. Unpublish returns to draft if needed.
• Completed — all results are in and the round is final. Revert to In Progress reopens it if a result must be fixed.

The normal cycle: Generate Pairings for Round → review → Publish Pairings → enter results → Complete Round. Complete stays disabled while games have no result (the tooltip tells you how many are missing).

Generating a round

Click Generate Pairings for Round. Checked-in players who aren't withdrawn or absent for the round are paired; with an odd number, the engine assigns a bye, shown as Bye (+points) using your configured bye points. Requested byes and absent players are listed below the boards.

If you configured Accelerated Pairings (Baku, Haley or Manual) in Settings → Competition rules, the acceleration is applied automatically during generation. Board numbers then follow the accelerated score printed beside each pairing, so the score groups the round was built from read down the board list in order. Board numbers are fixed when the round is generated: if you edit a player's extra points afterwards, regenerate the round to renumber the boards.

Round-robin tournaments work differently: a single Generate All Rounds creates the full Berger schedule at once, after you choose the player ordering (by rating is the FIDE default).

Important: A round can only be generated when the previous round is complete. If results are missing, Chesstide offers to complete the previous round for you — or blocks generation until you resolve it.

If bbpPairings cannot find a valid Swiss pairing (rare, typically tiny or heavily constrained fields), a replacement algorithm produces the round and a warning asks you to review the boards carefully.

Adjusting pairings manually

While the round is draft or published, the arbiter has the last word:

• Swap Mode — click two players to exchange them, put an unpaired or absent player onto a board, or fill a bye. Result entry is paused while swap mode is active. Every seat is also reachable with the keyboard: Tab to a player, then press Enter or Space to select.
• Swap colors — flips white and black on a board.
• Team tournaments additionally allow swapping whole teams and swapping players between boards, plus Regenerate boards to refresh lineups without losing entered results.

Tournaments using the Other pairing system are fully manual: pick pairs from the Players to pair roster and Chesstide numbers the boards for you.

Printing and exporting

Print views open in a new tab, ready for the pairing board: by Board, Alphabetical (individual), by Teams and Boards (team), and Results slips with signature lines. A PGN export is also available for games.

Presenter mode

Presenter mode opens the boards full-screen for a projector or a hall display — no cockpit around them, large type, dark by default with a light/dark toggle each browser remembers. The page refreshes itself every 20 seconds, and when the boards don't fit one screen it cycles through pages with a countdown ring.

The Presenter mode button sits on the tournament's public page, on its Pairings tab — the same page spectators see, not the cockpit. It offers three ways in:

• Live (auto-advance) — follows the latest published round on its own. This is the one to leave running in the hall.
• Present round N only — pins the display to the round you're looking at.
• Live, without Elo and score — the same live display without the two stat cells. Each board normally prints both players' rating and their score going into the round, taken from the same figures as the public pairings table; hiding them fits more boards on a 1080p projector.

Team tournaments are supported too: the display shows one compact row per team match — home team, match score, away team, plus byes — and cycles through them exactly like the individual view. Ratings and scores belong to individual boards, so that third menu entry doesn't appear for a team event.

Options in the address

Each menu entry above is really just a parameter on the presenter address, and you can type or combine them yourself — handy for a screen you set up once and leave running. Join several with &, for example .../pairings/presenter?round=3&interval=20.

Two screens, one round. from and to are what let a field larger than one projector can carry be split: open ?from=1&to=20 on one display and ?from=21&to=40 on the other, and each screen holds its own boards permanently instead of cycling through the whole list. The header of each screen names the range it is showing, so they are easy to tell apart.

A value the display doesn't understand — a round number that doesn't exist, or an impossible range like ?from=20&to=5 — is ignored and the default applies, so a mistyped address still shows the boards rather than an error page or an empty screen.

Fixing a generated round

A draft round with no results can be regenerated — click Generate Pairings for Round again. If results were already entered, use Erase All Results first (draft rounds only; byes are preserved), or clear the individual results. Completed rounds can't be regenerated.