Arbiter's notes on running a manually paired online tournament

** Note: yes the system doesn't let me publish it, Blog title should have 100 characters or less  

Original title: How to run an online tournament as if it was an OTB event - the 2024-25 Texas Scholastic Online Quick Championship on January 11

Wow, this is a long title! 
I probably should have found something shorter, but I really wanted to include both the reason why I'm blogging about this event and the event name
So thank you for reading the long title, and now let's jump in to the event!

After the Tuesday excitement with the Freestyle KO's first day (read about it here), and a few normal work days, weekend is for rest, or wait, no, weekend is for chess tournaments So Saturday, January 11, I got up early in the Pacific Time zone to run a fun event for the Texan scholastic chess community!

What's the event? The annual Texas Scholastic Quick Online Championship.
But really what is this event? It's online, so played on chess.com. It's scholastic, so for K-12 students only. It's Quick (aka Rapid for the rest of the world, cuz only in the US we call rapid quick): time control is G/15+3. And all this is organized by the Texas Chess Association. It's not the first one, thanks to then TCA president Franc Guadalupe, this event has been going on for a few years now, and the new TCA president David Ortiz continued with the tradition.

I hope to use this event as an example for anyone who is interested in doing similar events on Chess.com! So this won't be too much about the event itself, rather than they standard processes I do.

Organizer can choose between two ways to run an online tournament for a group:

1. Auto-run events: paired by the platform, with very limited work from the organizers during the event.
   Pro: after some pre-event planning (creating a club, adding players to the club and scheduling the event), the event almost runs itself, and arbiters don't have to do any work during the event. Pairings, game start, standings are all done by the platform.
   Con: arbiters can't do anything: no team restrictions in the pairings, no half point adjustments, no adding/removing players manually, and no other adjustments that arbiters might make in a tournament.
   Examples: our Community Club's events, Untitled Tuesdays, Opening Roulette, or our Verified Titled Players Club events like the famous Titled Tuesdays or the Bullet Brawl.
   

   

2. Manually run events: games are played on chess.com, but the pairings and the starting the games are done by an actual arbiter! 
   Pro: we basically can run the tournament as it was an OTB/IRL event: restrict pairings of players from the same school, give half point byes if anyone has to miss a round and they requested it in advance, and we can help players if they have technical problems, and delay their game just a bit so they reset their page.
   Con: it's a LOT of work during the event, and every game has to be started manually, one by one.
   Examples: our KO events like CCT, or any of the community championships' second part, or some of the past events I've run
   

   

Since any state scholastic event has a team competition component, we had no choice but to run it via the second option, the manual way. If you have any major reason why you want to keep the control of pairings, and starting the games, you should choose this. It's more work, but I actually like it that way! It's more relatable for the players, and I have a lot more opportunity to act as an arbiter, and solve problems

So what do you need if you are an arbiter and want to run a manually run event on chess.com?

1. List of players, along with their chess.com username!
2. Tournament software: just like the OTB events, we need to pair, round after round and hand pairing is not really an option cuz fast turnaround is needed!  
3. An online place where arbiters can post pairings and standings, and players can access it. I usually use Google Sheet for this purpose.
4. Match commands that the arbiter can start the games: these are generated from the pairings via a standard logic. More on this later.

If you are the organizer of this event, of course there is a few more important steps and a few more items to consider:

1. Pre-event planning should include:
   1. usual event announcement with important details with it: in addition to all the usual stuff, this should include a clear description of how the games are played online and what fair play regulations are mandatory, and consequences for violating fair player regulations.
   2. process registration often, and not only check for the membership, but also their username validity. Too often players misspell their username!
   3. strongly suggest pre-tournament town-hall meeting or Q&A session so that players (and parents!) can get the answers to all their questions!
   4. In addition to a Q&A, I found that having a warm-up practice event is a very useful way to get the players familiar with the process, and will help avoid a lot of headaches on the day of!
      

      

   5. prepare your zoom account: I usually use zoom to gather the players online so that I can make announcements and have a direct line to them, and also to monitor them. This account needs proper setup which is crucial for a smooth event. 
      
      
2. During the event we need to:
   1. Communicate with the players: they need to come online to zoom and then you can help them: direct them where they need to go and wait for their game to pop up, and they can also ask for any technical help.
   2. Communicate with the parents: every scholastic event, there is a room full of scholastic players, and there is the lobby full of parents with questions if you have a way to answer their questions during the event, it is super useful and rewarding. I usually use WhatsApp groups, or Slack.
      

      

   3. Run the event Pair, post pairings, start the games, monitor the games, input the results into the google sheet, input the results to the tournament software, and repeat it for the number of rounds you have!
      The person who is executing the starting of the games with the match commands they need to have a special role set for their accounts (aka Event Coordinator role on chess.com). Make sure to check with me or the events department before you plan on running such event! I'm also happy to train anyone who to do this, and share all my tips and tricks that I've learnt over the years!
      
      
3. Post event: 
   1. Request fair play review - this is pretty straightforward. Get the games reviewed and make sure no funky business. If there is any, since we are running a manually run event, we can adjust the scores. US Chess actually has clear rules on this. 
   2. Finalize the results: announce that the results are final.
      

      

   3. Submit the event for rating: this is US specific of course, because US Chess allows online games to be rated, affecting US Chess online ratings. Yes, we have separate online rating category for all three ratings (classical, rapid and blitz!), but this is for another post and another good story how that came about during the pandemic!
      

      

One last thing I'd like to mention: I've been running these kinds of online events for 5+ years now, and the improvements that were made on the process is truly amazing.
One of the huge update is that now we are able to "pull" the games into a dedicated events page.
What does this mean? When we start the games with the match command, that line includes a so called event tag, and based on that tag, the system recognizes and grabs the game and displays it on an events page that was set up for this event prior to it.

You can find the Texas event here:
https://www.chess.com/events/info/2024-25-texas-scholastic-online-quick-championships

This not only makes it so much easier for the parents and coaches to follow the games, but also helps us, arbiters, to monitor the games and also to control if we want to have any delay in the broadcasting the games (for fair play purposes). And post event, it's one quick download button and one can grab all the games!

And I could have gone one step further: we can use a thing called name mapping, and tell the system what username corresponds to what full name, and have the full names displayed on the events page instead of chess.com usernames! I did not do it this time, but perhaps next year, I'll have time to do this.

I'm sure I left out quite a few things, but must.get.sleep

Hope you enjoyed it. Any questions regarding the process, or need advice or training, I'm happy to help any and all arbiters, organizers.