Pairing Settings
Pairing Settings is the one screen that holds every rule about how a tournament’s rounds are paired — which pairing system runs, how colors are assigned, which tie-breaks rank the standings, and any pair of players who must never meet.
The settings you save here travel with the tournament. They are written into the SwissSys file you download, so SwissSys pairs with the rules you chose rather than with whatever settings profile happens to be saved on the laptop that opens the file. They also drive ChessRoster’s own pairing features, such as projected pairings, where those are enabled for your event.
Where to Find It
There are two versions of the screen, and they do different jobs.
| Screen | Where | What it sets |
|---|---|---|
| Tournament settings | Your tournament’s Manage page → Pairing Settings | The rules this one tournament pairs under, and any per-section exceptions. |
| Organizer defaults | Your organizer’s Manage page → Pairing Settings | The starting point every tournament you create from now on is given a copy of. |
Tournament directors and organizer admins can open the tournament screen. Organizer defaults are an organization-wide setting, so only organizer admins (and site admins) can change them — a director assigned to a single event cannot.
Organizer Defaults Are a Starting Point, Not a Live Link
This is the one part of the model worth reading twice.
Your organizer defaults are copied into each new tournament at the moment you create it. From then on, that tournament owns its copy. Editing your organizer defaults later changes what your next tournament starts with, and nothing else.
Changing your organizer defaults does not change any tournament that already exists. Every tournament you have already created keeps the settings it has — including one you created five minutes ago. This is deliberate: an event that is already running should never have its pairing rules changed underneath it.
If you do want an existing tournament to pick up your current defaults, open that tournament’s Pairing Settings and use Apply my organizer defaults. It takes a fresh copy and replaces that tournament’s settings, and it asks you to confirm first. It still only touches the one tournament you are looking at.
A small chip at the top of the tournament screen tells you where its settings came from:
- Engine defaults — nothing has been configured; the pairing engine is using its own standard behaviour. Saving once takes control.
- Started from your ___ defaults — the tournament was created from your organizer template and nobody has renamed the settings since.
- This tournament’s own settings — someone has set them up for this event specifically.
One Set of Rules, or One Per Section
Most events want a single set of rules everywhere. That is the default:
- Use the same settings for every section — every section pairs under the settings on this screen.
- Configure sections separately — a list of your sections appears. Expand any one of them and choose Configure this section separately to give it its own copy of the rules, which you can then change on its own.
A section only gets its own settings when you ask for them, and it starts from whatever it is pairing under today rather than from a blank slate. A section you have not touched keeps following the tournament settings, so a later change at the tournament level reaches it.
Switching back to Use the same settings for every section discards the settings any section had of its own. You will be asked to confirm, and the sections you are about to reset are named in the confirmation — read that list before accepting.
One thing worth knowing: a section counts as “Overridden” from the moment you give it its own settings, even if you never change a value. It will not follow future tournament-level changes until you reset it.
Choosing a Pairing System
Each section is paired by one of two systems, chosen at the top of the settings.
USCF
The full USCF Swiss rules, matching SwissSys. This is the right choice for a US-rated event, and it is where all the detailed controls live — colors, restrictions, bye handling, Swiss options, round-robin options and the rest, grouped into sections you can expand as you need them. Every control carries a short explanation next to it, so you do not have to know the rulebook shorthand to use the screen.
FIDE Dutch
The official FIDE Dutch pairing rules. Choosing FIDE collapses the screen to almost nothing: the number of rounds, and your tie-breaks.
FIDE having almost no options is correct, not a limitation. FIDE’s pairing rules (C.04.3) already fix color allocation, floats and the bye — there is no room for a director to choose differently, so ChessRoster does not offer choices that would have no effect. Nothing is being hidden from you; the USCF controls simply do not apply to a FIDE section.
Because the choice is per section, a tournament can run a FIDE-rated top section alongside USCF-paired lower sections. Give each section its own settings and pick the system on each one.
Tie-Breaks
Tie-breaks decide the order of players on equal score, and therefore who takes which prize. They are set here, in an ordered list — the first tie-break is applied first, and the next one only breaks ties the first one leaves.
Tie-breaks belong to the pairing system you chose: the USCF list and the FIDE list are different sets of methods with different names. Switching a section between USCF and FIDE resets its tie-breaks to that system’s standard set, because a USCF tie-break has no meaning under FIDE. If you had a custom order, set it again after switching.
Leaving the list alone gives you the standard tie-breaks for your pairing system, which is the right answer for most events.
Team sections get a second list for team tie-breaks, alongside the individual one.
Do-Not-Pair Exclusions
Sometimes two players must never face each other — siblings, a coach and their student, two players who travelled together and would rather not play each other in round one. Do-not-pair exclusions record that permanently for a section, and every round respects it: live pairings, re-pairings, and projected pairings alike.
Exclusions belong to a single section, because they name two registered players and a player belongs to exactly one section. Choose Configure sections separately, expand the section, pick the two players, and add an optional note for yourself.
You do not have to give a section its own pairing rules to do this. A section still using the tournament settings keeps its do-not-pair list in the same place, and adding one changes nothing else about how that section is paired — it will still follow the tournament settings when you change them. (If the section does have its own rules, the list sits in the Pairing Restrictions area of them instead.)
An exclusion is a hard rule, not a preference. The pairing engine will never break it, even if that is the only way to pair the round. Add too many in a small section — or exclude one player from everybody else — and the round becomes impossible to pair, and pairing will fail rather than quietly ignore your list. ChessRoster warns you on this screen when a section is getting close to that point, but keep the list as short as the situation genuinely requires.
Two more things to know:
- Round-robin sections cannot honour exclusions. A round robin pairs everyone against everyone, so there is no schedule that avoids a pairing. ChessRoster warns you rather than refusing to pair.
- Exclusions are permanent for the section. They are not a one-round adjustment. If you only want to avoid a pairing in a single round, fix that round’s pairings directly instead.
Byes Are Set in Tournament Setup
The bye limits and bye request deadlines your players see — how many half-point byes are allowed, which rounds they may be taken in, and the deadline for requesting each one — are not set on this screen. They belong to each section in the tournament setup wizard, alongside the entry fee and the round schedule, because they are part of what a player agrees to when they register.
Pairing Settings shows you those limits read-only, right next to the bye handling rules that use them, with a link to the setup wizard if you need to change them. See Registration Tiers & Section Pricing for how bye limits and deadlines are configured.
What is on this screen is how strictly the pairing engine tries to honour bye requests, and what a bye is worth.
Frequently Asked
I changed my organizer defaults and my tournament did not change.
That is expected — see Organizer Defaults Are a Starting Point. Open the tournament’s own Pairing Settings and use Apply my organizer defaults if you want it to take a fresh copy.
I changed the tournament settings and one section did not follow.
That section has settings of its own. Open Configure sections separately and look for the section marked Overridden — either edit it directly, or reset every section back to the tournament settings.
Where did the option I used to see go?
One control was removed: the same-ZIP restriction. It had no effect on ChessRoster’s pairings — there is no ZIP on a registration to compare — and it is the one restriction SwissSys has no setting for either, so there was nothing an export could carry. In SwissSys, a ZIP restriction is expressed through the soft restriction instead.
The same-club, same-city, same-state and same-class restrictions are still here. Read their help text before you use one: they do nothing when ChessRoster pairs a round, because a registration carries no club, city, state or rating class. They are written into your SwissSys tournament file, and SwissSys applies them against the data it holds — so they are worth setting if you pair the event in SwissSys, and worth ignoring if you pair it here. Collect club, city or state with a registration question and your exported file will carry those values for SwissSys to match on.
Pairing failed and mentioned excluded players.
Your do-not-pair list is over-constrained for that section — there is no legal set of pairings left. Remove an exclusion, or take the affected player out of the round with a bye.
Related Topics
- Tournament Management Panel — where the tournament’s Manage page lives
- Managing Pairings — running rounds and releasing pairings to players
- Downloading Registrations — the SwissSys export your settings travel in
- Registration Tiers & Section Pricing — bye limits, bye deadlines and round schedules
- Creating Tournaments — where sections and round counts are set up