Players, check-in and the waiting list
The cockpit's Players tab is your control room for everyone taking part: confirming entries, checking players in on the day, adding late entries, and handling absences and withdrawals.
The player list
Individual tournaments list every player with their pairing number, name, rating, title, registration status, check-in and withdrawal state. Team tournaments show teams with their rosters instead. Search, filter by status or payment, and sort by pairing number, name or rating. Use Columns to show or hide optional columns — for example Affiliated, which shows each player's national federation membership: Yes, No (listed with the federation but not affiliated), or a dash when the federation can't place the player (a foreign entrant, or no national ID), or Notes, the comment the player left when registering (the full text shows on hover).
Useful list-wide actions:
- Update all ratings and Refresh info pull the latest ratings and details from the federation and FIDE data. Until round 1 is published this also moves each player's Registration rating — the basis for prize categories — so a FIDE list published between registration and the event is picked up. Once round 1 is out that basis is frozen and only the pairing rating moves.
- Export CSV respects your current filters and lets you pick columns, including Affiliated (Yes / No / blank) and Notes.
- Team tournaments have a printable Check-in Sheet listing each team's boards with a checkbox column.
Checking players in
Players must be checked in to be included in pairings. On tournament day:
- Toggle check-in per player, or select several and use the bulk Check In action.
- Check-in All checks in every confirmed player at once; Uncheck-in All reverses it.
Tip: Players can also check themselves in online when they view their registration — you'll see their status update live. Do a final pass with the Players tab before generating round 1.
Requiring payment before check-in
Tournaments that collect an entry fee can make check-in depend on it. Tick Only allow check-in once the entry fee is paid in the attendance confirmation section of the tournament form — it appears once Require attendance confirmation on tournament day is on.
A player whose fee is outstanding then can't check themselves in: in place of the Check in button they read "Your entry fee has not been paid yet, so you cannot check in. Please see the organizer." Registering while a check-in window is open no longer checks them in automatically either — they stay Confirmed until the fee is settled.
| Payment status | Can check themselves in |
|---|---|
| Paid | Yes |
| Waived | Yes — waiving is your decision to exempt them |
| Unpaid, Partial, Refunded | No |
An entry that owes nothing is never held back, whatever its payment status — a free tournament, a title exemption, or a discount that brings the fee to zero.
Every override stays yours:
- Edit payment on the player's row unblocks them the moment you mark the fee paid or waived.
- The check-in toggle and the bulk actions above still work — checking a player in yourself is always allowed.
- An unpaid fee never blocks a cockpit add: when the add checks the player in (see Adding a late entry below), it does so paid or not.
Important: This only governs players checking themselves in, and only in individual tournaments — self check-in isn't available for team events. If a player you checked in yourself tries to undo it while unpaid, Chesstide warns them first that only you can check them back in.
Adding a late entry
Click the add button on the Players tab. Two ways to find players:
- Search — by name or FIDE/federation ID; matches existing profiles or creates a new one, so no duplicates appear.
- By Club — pick a federation club and select players straight from its member list (for countries with a supported federation, currently Belgium).
Entries added from the cockpit are immediately Confirmed, with fees calculated automatically. If a player doesn't meet the tournament's age or rating restrictions, Chesstide shows a confirmation asking whether to add them anyway.
They are also checked in straight away when a check-in window is open — or when the tournament defines no check-in period at all, since check-in is what puts a player in the pairings. Add players outside a window (entering your field days before the event, for instance) and they stay Confirmed: check them in on the day with the toggle or the bulk Check In action.
Correcting a player's details
Edit Player Info on a player's row corrects the identity Chesstide shows for this tournament — name, title, country, date of birth, rating and Club.
Two rating fields sit side by side. Rating is the one pairings and rating-based tie-breaks use; Registration rating decides which prize category the player competes in. Each is guarded on its own — setting one by hand pins it against Update all ratings and leaves the other free to follow.
The club is normally resolved live from federation data, so a player who changed club, whose federation record is stale, who belongs to a brand-new club, or who comes from a foreign federation could show a wrong or empty club with no way to fix it. The Club field handles both cases with one control: start typing to search the tournament federation's clubs and pick one, or type any name for a club Chesstide can't look up — it tells you "No club found — the name you typed will be used as is."
The change applies to this tournament only, and clearing the field brings the federation club back. What you set is what everyone sees: the Players tab, the players CSV export, the public participants list and the player popover in the standings.
Refresh from federation, on the same dialog, does the opposite — it pulls the latest date of birth, gender, country, FIDE ID and club from the federation.
Absences, byes and withdrawals
Per player you can record, from the row's editor:
- Absent rounds — rounds the player will miss; the pairing engine skips them for those rounds.
- Bye requests — if allowed in Settings → Competition rules, requested byes score the configured bye points. A round can't be both absent and a bye, and completed rounds can no longer be changed.
- Withdrawn — the player leaves the tournament from a given round onwards; badges show Withdrawn, Absent R… or Bye R… in the list.
Deleting a registration removes it entirely. Once a player appears in a pairing, they can no longer be cancelled: use Withdrawn instead, which marks every remaining round as absent.
The waiting list
When your tournament is full, new registrations become Waitlisted automatically. Open the Waiting list view to manage the queue:
- Promote confirms the player into the tournament.
- Remove cancels the entry.
- Drag entries to reorder the queue.
Whenever a confirmed, pending or checked-in entry is cancelled — by you, including in a bulk Cancel, or by the player themselves — the next players in the queue move up automatically into the places it frees.
The bulk Confirm and Check In actions follow the same queue: they seat waitlisted players in waiting-list order, and only while places remain. Players they can't seat, and cancelled players, are left as they are, and the cockpit tells you how many were skipped.
Important: While pairings are being generated the player list is briefly locked — a check-in or bulk action attempted at that exact moment shows a "pairing in progress" notice; just retry a moment later.