Creating and configuring a tournament

This article covers creating a tournament — from a two-minute announcement to a fully configured event — and the settings you can adjust afterwards in the cockpit's Configuration tab.

Announce or manage?

Click Create Tournament and choose how you want to set up your event:

Announce a Tournament (~2 minutes) — quickly list your tournament with the essential details so players can find it. Registration happens elsewhere (your website, email…).
Manage a Tournament (~10 minutes) — full configuration with registration, pairings, fees, eligibility, and more. Choose this to run the tournament in Chesstide.

You can switch between the two at any time while filling the form (Switch to full configuration / Switch to quick announcement), and an announced tournament can be upgraded later by enabling registration.

The essential details

Every tournament needs:

Tournament Name, Start Date and End Date
City and Country
Tournament Type — Open, Invitational or School
Participation Mode — Individual or Team
Time Control Type — Standard, Rapid or Blitz
Number of Rounds

Optionally add a description, venue, an Organization (recommended — see Managing your organization), and contact details.

Important: The Participation Mode (individual vs team) cannot be changed once players have registered. Everything else can be adjusted later.

Full configuration options

In manage mode you can additionally set up:

Registration Period — a registration start date and deadline; outside this window players cannot register.
Pairing System — Swiss, Round-robin (with games per pairing and Cyclic or Grouped distribution), or Other, plus a per-round schedule.
Team settings — minimum/maximum players per team, players per match, and an optional team limit. Individual tournaments can set a maximum number of players instead.
Eligibility — age restrictions (Youth (U20), Senior (50+) or custom min/max age) and rating restrictions.
Fees — an Entry Fee (€), per-player or per-team for team events, plus flexible fee rules: exemptions for titled players, discounts by age, gender, club membership or rating, and an optional late fee after a cutoff date.
Homologation — mark the tournament as National or FIDE rated.
Visibility — Public (listed everywhere), Organisation only (hidden from search and the tournament list, but listed on your organization's page) or Private (listed nowhere). Anyone with the direct link can always open the page — see Tournament states and visibility.

Formatting long text

Four fields accept markdown, so a description or a prize breakdown can be structured instead of arriving as one flat block:

Description — the main presentation of your event.
Prize Fund Details — in the Prizes & Categories section.
Extra Fee Information and Payment Information — in Registration Settings, for what the entry fee alone doesn't cover: bank details, on-site payment rules, deposits.

Each field has a Formatting help toggle underneath listing the supported syntax: bold, italic, ## headings, bullet and numbered lists, links, and tables. Line breaks are kept as you type them; leave a blank line between paragraphs. Images and raw HTML are not supported.

All four appear as formatted text on the public tournament page, and can be edited at any time from the manage page.

Tip: A table is the clearest way to present a prize list or a fee schedule — one row per line, with the second line drawing the header.

Publish now or save as draft

The Publish immediately checkbox decides whether the tournament goes public straight away. If unchecked, it is saved as a draft — invisible to players until you publish it from the manage page. See Publishing and managing registrations.

The Configuration tab

After creation, the cockpit's Configuration tab is where you refine the sporting rules:

Rating System — FIDE priority, national priority, or highest rating.
Tiebreaks — the ordered list of tie-breaks for the standings (see Tie-break definitions), plus board tie-breaks and team scoring for team events.
Categories — prize/ranking categories by age, rating or gender.
Prizes — prize lists and the split method.
Bye Points and Bye Requests — what a bye scores and whether players may request one.
First Player Color for round 1, Accelerated Pairings (None, Baku, Haley or Manual), and Handicap Tournament mode.
FIDE Event Codes — for FIDE-homologated tournaments, needed for the TRF report.
Tournament Staff and Forbidden Pairings — covered in their own articles.

Click Save Changes after editing a section.

Tip: Configure tie-breaks and categories before the first round if you can. Changing them mid-event recomputes the standings players have already seen.