Creating and configuring a tournament

Creating a tournament is one short form. Everything else — registration, fees, pairing, tie-breaks, categories, prizes, staff — is configured afterwards in the cockpit's Settings pages, one topic at a time.

The creation form

Click Create Tournament. The form asks only for what a tournament cannot exist without, in five short sections:

• Basic Information — Tournament Name, an optional Description, an optional Organization (recommended — see Managing your organization) and the Visibility level.
• Tournament Dates — Start Date and End Date.
• Tournament Location — an optional Venue Name, plus City and Country.
• Tournament Type & Participation Mode — Tournament Type (Open, Invitational or School), Participation Mode (Individual Tournament or Team Tournament), Time Control Type (Standard, Rapid or Blitz) and the Number of Rounds.
• Tournament Contact & Links — an optional contact email and website, so an announcement is worth reading.

Visibility has three levels: Public (listed everywhere), Organization only (hidden from the tournament list, but listed on your organization's page and found by a search on your organization's name) or Private (listed nowhere). Anyone with the direct link can always open the page — see Tournament states and visibility.

Nothing else is asked here. Registration and fees, the pairing system and round schedule, eligibility rules, tie-breaks, categories, prizes, homologation and staff each have their own settings page, and creation drops you straight into the cockpit where they live.

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

Time control

The creation form asks only for the broad Time Control Type. The detail lives on Settings → Format & schedule, in the Encoded time control (FIDE) section, where two fields describe your time control — and they do different jobs.

Time Control Details, the first field in that section, is free text: whatever you would write on a poster, such as 90 min + 30 sec/move or 40/100+30, then 15+30, no addition until move 60. It can carry conditions the structured fields cannot.

The Encoded time control (FIDE) editor underneath it is the structured version, and it is the one FIDE reads. A rated report has to carry the time control in a coded form; a report without it can be refused by your federation's rating officer. Fill it in for any tournament you intend to have rated.

Periods

Most tournaments need a single row — 90 minutes with a 30-second increment:

Leave Moves empty on the last row: that period covers the rest of the game. Don't type 999 there, as some other programs do — FIDE reads it as a real move count and the report is refused, so Chesstide won't save it. A two-period control takes a second row — 40 moves in 100 minutes, then 15 minutes to finish, 30-second increment throughout:

+ Add a period adds a row, up to eight; the × at the end of a row removes it. The Sec column is only for a base time that is not a whole number of minutes — leave it empty otherwise.

Armageddon

Switch to Armageddon for an asymmetric clock: White's and Black's times are set separately, and Wins on a draw records who takes the point if the game is drawn — Black, by FIDE convention. A tournament is either periods or Armageddon, never both.

Checking what FIDE will receive

Under the fields, What the FIDE report will contain previews the two records your export will carry — the coded one and its readable form — and updates as you type. Read it before saving:

• Nothing can be encoded yet means a rated report exported now would have no time control at all.
• Read from the time control details above means Chesstide understood your free text and will fall back to it. That works, but filling in the fields is safer — the fallback only recognizes common phrasings.

Tip: Existing tournaments open with the fields already filled in from their Time Control Details, wherever that text could be understood. Check the preview and save to make it definite.

The structured time control is also what the public tournament page shows, translated for each visitor — so an event entered in French reads correctly for a Dutch player. The free text is shown only when no structured time control is set.

Formatting long text

Five 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, on the creation form and afterwards on Settings → General. Below it, optional translations (English, French, Dutch) replace the description for visitors browsing in that language; anyone else sees the main description.
• Prize Fund Details and Category Prizes — on Settings → Categories & Prizes, beside the categories and prize lists they describe.
• Extra Fee Information and Payment Information — on Settings → Registration & fees, for what the entry fee alone doesn't cover: on-site payment rules, deposits. Bank details for a payment QR code have their own fields — see Bank transfer.

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 five appear as formatted text on the public tournament page, and can be edited at any time from the Settings pages.

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 on the creation form decides whether the tournament goes public straight away. If unchecked, it is saved as a draft — invisible to players until you publish it.

To publish later, set Publication status to Published on Settings → General. See Publishing and managing registrations.

The Settings pages

Settings in the cockpit is where the tournament is actually configured. It is nine pages, each holding one topic:

• General — the tournament's name and description, the organization behind it, who can find it, and whether it is published, plus optional per-language translations of the description. Print tournament poster is here too.
• Format & schedule — when the tournament is played and how: dates, type, participation mode, time control, number of rounds, the pairing system with its round schedule, and the team roster limits.
• Registration & fees — who may enter, when, and what it costs: the registration window, attendance confirmation and check-in (see Players, check-in and the waiting list), entry caps, age and rating eligibility, the federation membership rule (where your national federation is supported: All players, Affiliated players only, Affiliated players and FIDE-registered players, or Affiliated players and foreign FIDE-registered players), the Public participants list (Always, Once enough players have registered — from a number of players you choose, waiting-list and cancelled entries not counted — or Never; you and the other organizers always see the full list), the entry fee and its discount rules (title exemptions waive the fee entirely; a Title discount rule reduces it instead — e.g. free for GM/IM/FM, −50% for CM).
• Location & contact — where the tournament happens, and how players reach the organizer: venue, address, city, country, email, phone, website and social links.
• Categories & Prizes — ranking and prize categories by age, rating, gender, or — where your national federation is supported — club and membership, and the prize lists that pay them out (see Prizes).
• Ranking & tie-breaks — the ordered tie-break list for the standings (see Tie-break definitions), board tie-breaks, and team scoring for team events.
• Competition rules — game scoring, bye points and bye requests, the first colour of round 1, accelerated pairings, reserve alignment, handicap mode, and the way through to Forbidden pairings.
• Ratings & FIDE — the rating system (FIDE priority, national priority or highest rating), fictitious ratings for unrated players, national and FIDE homologation, and the FIDE event codes the TRF report needs (each numeric code links to its tournament page on the FIDE ratings site).
• Staff — the arbiters and organizers working on the tournament (see Staff and arbiter access).

Each page saves on its own: edit what you need, then Save changes in the bar at the bottom. An Unsaved changes marker appears the moment you touch a field, and leaving the page while it shows asks you to confirm. Staff is the exception — its rows apply as you add or remove them, so it has no save button.

Every page has its own address, so the one you visit often can be bookmarked, and moving between them does not reload the tournament.

A simultaneous exhibition sees a shorter list: Ranking & tie-breaks and Competition rules decide nothing for a simul, so they are absent from its nav.

Bank transfer

The Bank transfer block on Settings → Registration & fees shows entrants a payment QR code they can scan with their banking app. It appears on their confirmation page and their registration for as long as they owe something.

If the tournament belongs to an organization with bank details, the block says the values are inherited and shows them as placeholders; fill in a field only to override it for this tournament. Without an organization, or without an IBAN on either side, no QR code is shown.

Payment reference sets how each entry's reference is written:

Important: A reference is generated once per entry and never changes. Changing the option affects new entries only, and renaming the tournament or a player does not rewrite references already given out — so what arrives on your bank statement always matches what the entrant was shown.

The setup checklist

A freshly created tournament lands on the cockpit with a Finish setting up checklist above the General page. It lists what is still unanswered — the pairing system, the venue, a contact address, the tie-breaks, publication — and each line links straight to the page that settles it. A second, shorter list holds what you may quite reasonably never do: adding staff, or opening registration on Chesstide at all.

The checklist reads the tournament itself every time it is shown, so a task never claims a page was configured when it wasn't. Once everything is answered — or sooner, if the list isn't useful to you — Hide this puts it away for good.

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