Managing Pairings

ChessRoster displays pairings that are uploaded from SwissSys. Your role as director is to run pairings in SwissSys, sync the data to ChessRoster, and then approve notifications so players are informed each round.

Prerequisites

• You must be assigned as a tournament director or organizer admin for the event.
• SwissSys must be configured and connected to ChessRoster. See Downloading Registrations and Publishing Results to ChessRoster.
• The pairing rules the exported file carries — pairing system, colors, tie-breaks and any do-not-pair exclusions — are set in Pairing Settings before you export. Check them once before round 1; SwissSys uses the rules the file states rather than the settings profile on your laptop.

How Pairings Reach ChessRoster

In the standard workflow, ChessRoster displays the pairings you generate in SwissSys — it does not pair the rounds itself. (The one exception is projected pairings, an estimate generated before the event from registrations.) The workflow each round is:

1. Run pairings in SwissSys as usual.
2. Get the data to ChessRoster — with live sync (SwissSys v11.76+: click Sync Now, or leave Auto-Sync on) or by uploading a web report. See Publishing Results to ChessRoster.
3. ChessRoster updates the pairings display automatically.

Players see pairings on the tournament’s Reports tab as soon as the sync or upload completes.

What Players See

Once pairings are uploaded, players can view them on the tournament’s public Reports tab or the preview Pairings tab. The page:

• Shows board number, player names, ratings, and results
• Labels byes and forfeits with their SwissSys symbol and plain-language meaning, e.g. H — Half-bye (½)
• Lets players pick a section when a tournament has multiple sections

New-Round Notifications

The page checks for new pairings about every 30 seconds. Instead of silently jumping a viewer forward, ChessRoster shows a banner — “Round N pairings are ready” — with a View round N button. Players choose whether to advance; they are never pulled to a new round automatically.

This banner appears on the Reports and Pairings tabs.

Pairing Notifications

When enabled, ChessRoster can notify players who opted in — by SMS, email, or both — alerting them when round pairings are published.

How It Works

After pairings are uploaded to ChessRoster, the system:

1. Detects new pairing data and creates a pending notification release.
2. Sends an approval email to the tournament director.
3. Waits for director approval before sending any messages.

The director must approve before any messages are sent. This prevents notifications from going out for incomplete or incorrect pairings.

Where to Review Notifications

You can review and approve releases two ways:

• From the approval email — each release sends an email with a Review & approve link.
• From the Notifications tab — open the tournament’s Manage page and select the Notifications tab. This tab lists every round’s release with its status (Pending approval, Sent, Declined, Cancelled, or Expired) and a Review & approve button for any pending release.

The review page shows every message about to be sent — player name, board number, color, and the message content — so you can confirm the pairings before dispatching.

What Players Receive

Subscribed players receive a message on their chosen channel(s):

• SMS — a single short line, e.g. “Spring Open R3: You are White vs A. Player (1850) on Board 5.” Byes read “You have a bye this round.” A round start time and an optional director note are appended when they fit.
• Email — the full pairing details: opponent name and rating, color, board number, section, and round start time (when configured).

Only players who opted in during registration receive messages, and only on the channels they selected.

Cancelling a Sent Release

If you approve a release and then discover the pairings were wrong, you can send a follow-up cancellation notice from the Notifications tab:

• Click Cancel pairings on a sent release to notify those players to disregard the original pairing.
• Cancellation is only available for a limited window (12 hours after the release was sent, and before the next round’s release is sent).

Notification Quota

Notifications are subject to a per-tournament quota of 10 notifications per paid registration (SMS and email combined). The Notifications tab and the approval page both show how much of the quota has been used. Approval is blocked once the quota is exhausted.

Projected Pairings

If the organizer has enabled projected pairings, a Projected Pairings tab appears on the public tournament page. Projected pairings show estimated matchups based on current registrations, so players can see who they may face before the event starts.

They are:

• Generated by ChessRoster’s own pairing engine from completed, non-withdrawn registrations — not from SwissSys
• Read-only — players cannot interact with them
• Recalculated automatically as players register
• For Swiss sections, a Round 1 projection; for round-robin sections, the full projected schedule
• Paired under the tournament’s Pairing Settings, including any do-not-pair exclusions

Projected pairings are part of the pairing-notifications feature that is still rolling out to preview customers. See SMS Pairings & Results for current availability and how to request early access.

Team and Ladder Formats

Each of these four formats replaces the ordinary Generate pairings button with a screen suited to how the format actually plays. All four also show a Teams & boards panel above the pairing screen where relevant — see Pairing Settings for the Team Scoring and Ladder Rules settings that shape how each one pairs and scores.

Team Match

A Team Match plays every round of the whole match at once, so instead of pairing one round at a time you set up the match and generate the entire schedule in one step:

1. Choose the board order within each team — By rating (highest-rated player on board 1), By lots (a lottery draw that repeats each time you toss again), or Leave unchanged (the order already saved in Teams & boards).
2. Click Toss for sides to see a preview of both lineups and which team plays on the left as Team A. Swap sides flips which team is on the left without a new toss. Neither button writes anything — they only preview what generating would produce.
3. Click Generate all N rounds to pair the whole match from the previewed lineups and side. Every board of every round is created in this one step.

Regenerating an already-scheduled match asks you to confirm, and is refused once any result has been recorded. Use Set up again to reopen the setup screen for an already-scheduled match. Other refusals — unequal team sizes, an unsupported number of boards, a withdrawn player — are shown inline.

Fixed Roster

Fixed Roster pairs round by round, like Swiss, but at the team level:

• The Teams & boards panel lists each team’s players in board order and lets you set the team cut — how many top boards a match actually uses (and how many boards feed the team’s rating). Leaving it unset lets SwissSys’s own default (4 boards) apply when round 1 is paired.
• Before pairing (or re-pairing) a round, the Forced team pairings card lets you pin which teams play each other and which team takes White on board 1, the same setup SwissSys offers. Any team you do not pin is paired normally by the engine around your forced pairs.
• Once paired, results are entered per board like an ordinary Swiss round; the section’s team standings (see below) update as boards are resulted.
• Team byes and forfeits are handled the same way an individual Swiss round handles them — a team without an opponent this round receives a team bye, and an unplayed board is scored as a forfeit once you enter it.

Teams-Only Fixed Roster

Teams-Only Fixed Roster pairs individual players (each team member is paired like a Swiss competitor, kept off their own teammates), but scores by team. Alongside each match’s result, a match game points field records the match’s game score across its boards — enter each side’s points in half-point steps (for example “3½ – ½”); the two sides must add up to the section’s team cut. Enter the result first — a match with no score recorded yet is scored from its result.

Ladder

A Ladder section has its own workflow rather than “Generate pairings,” walked through in order on the section’s Pairings tab:

1. Seed the ladder — choose By rating (highest rated on top), Random order, or Keep current order, new players at the bottom, then click Seed ladder (or Reseed ladder if it already has one, which asks you to confirm before replacing the order).
2. Reorder, add, or remove players — drag a player to a new rung, or use Add to place a late entrant at a chosen rung and Remove from ladder to take a player off it outside of a round’s own movement.
3. Pick who is active this round — use Select all / Select none, or choose players individually.
4. Enter challenges — pick a Challenger and Defender and add the pairing. A challenge outside the configured challenge range shows a warning rather than blocking you; use Pair anyway to keep it. Manual byes are added the same way.
5. Auto-pair the rest — click Auto-pair remaining to have the engine pair or bye every active player you have not already paired or byed by hand, or Review manual pairings only to skip auto-pairing.
6. Review and save — the proposed round lists every pairing and bye before anything is written; click Save round N pairings to commit it.
7. Enter results on the round’s pairings/results screen as usual.
8. Apply results — once every game in the round has a result, click Apply results to ladder to move players per the ladder rules. Confirm the dialog; a round can only be applied once.
9. Confirm withdrawal proposals — applying results can propose withdrawing a player who has missed too many rounds. Nothing is withdrawn until you select the proposed players and click Withdraw selected. A ladder withdrawal carries no refund and sends no notification email, because it is a ranking decision rather than a registration cancellation.

The Ladder Rules group in Pairing Settings controls what happens on a win, draw, loss, or missed round, plus the challenge range and auto-pair mode; a read-only summary of the section’s current rules appears alongside the workflow.

Team Standings

Fixed Roster, Teams-Only Fixed Roster and Team Match sections rank teams by match points first, then game points: a team earns 2 match points for a match win and 1 for a draw, and ties in match points are broken by the team’s total game points across all its boards.

Troubleshooting

Pairings are not showing on ChessRoster.

Confirm SwissSys has synced after running pairings — click Sync Now in the ChessRoster dialog, or upload a fresh web report. See Publishing Results to ChessRoster.

The approval email did not arrive.

Check your spam folder. The sender is ChessRoster and the subject includes the tournament name and round number. If pairings were re-uploaded before you approved, the old email is invalidated — look for a newer message.

The approval link says “expired” or “already processed.”

Links expire after one hour. If pairings changed since the link was sent, a new release is issued automatically. Open the Notifications tab on the Manage page (or check your inbox) for the most recent release.

A player says they did not receive a notification.

Confirm the player opted in to notifications during registration, and on which channel. Check the player’s communication preferences on the Manage page. SMS and email delivery are not guaranteed and may be delayed.

Related Topics

• Downloading Registrations — Export players to SwissSys before pairing
• Publishing Results to ChessRoster — Sync SwissSys data to ChessRoster each round
• Live Results — Display standings on a live board during the event
• Managing Participants — Edit or withdraw players before pairing
• Pairing Settings — Pairing system, tie-breaks, and do-not-pair exclusions