Over-the-board chess tournaments: pairings and live results

An over-the-board tournament is a chess or draughts event played at real boards: in a school, a club, a community centre or a sports hall. Klyo Games does the arbiter's paperwork that usually needs separate software and sheets of paper on the wall. The organiser creates the tournament in the browser, enters the name, date, city, venue, time control and number of rounds, and then adds players one by one or pastes a whole list from a spreadsheet: surname and first name, rating, club, FIDE ID and year of birth.

One button pairs each round. In the Swiss system the pairings follow rules modelled on the FIDE Dutch system: nobody meets the same opponent twice, players with the same score face each other, and colours are balanced, so white is usually followed by black. With an odd number of players the bye goes to the lowest-ranked player who has not had one yet. In a round robin, where everyone plays everyone, the pairings come from the Berger tables. The arbiter can swap players between boards, reverse colours, withdraw a player or give a half-point bye.

The arbiter enters results from a phone with one tap: 1–0, draw, 0–1 or a forfeit. The standings update at once, with tie-breaks: Buchholz, Buchholz cut 1, Sonneborn-Berger, direct encounter and number of wins. The organiser can let assistant arbiters in with a link, so several people enter results from different tables at the same time.

Players, parents and fans do not have to crowd around a notice board. The tournament page shows the current round's pairings, the results and the standings live, without reloading. Typing a surname is enough to see your board and your colour. The projector view shows the pairings in large letters together with a QR code that leads to the tournament page.

After the last round the arbiter downloads a TRF file, the FIDE tournament report format. Federation software reads this file when a tournament is submitted for rating; the arbiter sends the submission, because Klyo itself does not send anything to FIDE or a national federation. Over-the-board tournaments are free, work on a computer, tablet and phone, and need no installation. If you prefer to play online, the same chess and draughts have online tournaments on Klyo, where the server referees every game.