Why Import from Caissa?

Caissa Chess is a tournament registration and live-results service used by many clubs and organizers. TournaChess can import a Caissa event — sections, players, rounds, games, and standings — directly from its URL.

This is useful when you want to:

• Keep all your club results in one place. Events you ran on Caissa live alongside your TournaChess tournaments, with the same standings pages, history, and player records.

• Bring historical events into TournaChess. Import past Caissa events so they can be viewed, shared, and included in Grand Prix scoring.

• Follow an event that is still running. Unlike a completed-events-only import, a Caissa event that is still in progress can be imported and then re-synced as later rounds are paired and results come in.

Prerequisites

Before you import:

• You need the Tournament Director role (or higher) in your club.

• You need the Caissa event URL. Open the event on Caissa and copy the URL from your browser's address bar. Both the live-results and registration URLs work:

  • https://caissachess.net/live/8338
  • https://caissachess.net/register/9203

  A trailing sub-path (for example https://caissachess.net/register/9203/players) is fine — TournaChess reads the event number from the URL. Note that a registration URL for an event that has not yet started will import an empty tournament; see Events That Have Not Started.

How to Import

1. Go to your club's Tournaments page.
2. Click the Import dropdown and select Import from Caissa.
3. Paste the Caissa event URL and click Continue.
4. TournaChess reads the event and shows you what it found — the tournament name, each section with its player count, and a note listing anything that will not come across (see What Does Not Import). Nothing has been saved yet at this point.
5. Review that summary and click Import, or Cancel to go back and try a different URL.
6. When the import completes, you'll see a summary with the tournament name, the number of sections, and the number of players. Click through to view the imported tournament.

Tip: The Import from Caissa action is also available in the Quick Actions sidebar on your club's homepage.

Large events take a moment while TournaChess fetches every section, round, and pairing from Caissa.

What Gets Imported

TournaChess reconstructs the event from the data Caissa publishes:

• Tournament details — Event name, start and end dates, and the event description, with a link back to the original Caissa event added to the description.

• Sections — Each Caissa section becomes a TournaChess section, preserving its name.

• Players — Every player is imported with their name, USCF ID, and rating, and a registration is created for them in the correct section.

• Rounds and games — Every paired round is recreated with colors, results, and byes.

• Standings — Scores are imported along with each player's initial rating, performance rating, and estimated post-event rating.

Imported tournaments use the club's timezone for start times. Caissa does not publish a timezone, so the club setting is the best available source — check the tournament's start time after importing if your club's timezone is not set.

Rating Type

A section is imported as USCF-rated when Caissa reports it as rated and at least one player in it has a USCF ID. Sections Caissa reports as unrated — or rated sections where no player has a USCF ID — are imported as unrated.

Tournament Status

The imported tournament's status is derived from the event itself. A tournament is imported as Complete when every section has played all of its rounds and no game is still in progress; anything short of that is imported as Active.

What Does Not Import

Caissa's public data does not include everything TournaChess can store, so a few fields arrive blank. The confirm step tells you which ones apply to the event you are importing.

• Grade — Caissa does not publish player grades, so the Grade column is empty on every imported registration. If you need grades for a scholastic event, fill them in from the Registrations tab after importing. They will not be overwritten by a later re-sync.

• Team — Caissa reports team only for players in the final round's pairings, so a player who did not play that round imports without one. The confirm step tells you how many registrations will have a blank team; on a non-scholastic event most of those players simply have no team to begin with. As with grade, a team you enter by hand survives a re-sync.

• Board numbers — Only the most recent round's board numbers are published, so earlier rounds import without them. Pairings, colors, and results for every round are unaffected.

• City and state — Not published, so these are blank on the imported tournament. Fill them in from the tournament settings if you plan to submit a USCF rating report.

• Time control and rating ceiling — Not published per section; set them on each section after importing if you need them.

Events That Have Not Started

Caissa publishes a roster only once the first round is paired. Importing an event that is still in its registration phase therefore creates a tournament with no players — the confirm step warns you when this is the case. Wait until the event has begun, or create the tournament in TournaChess and take registrations there instead.

Duplicate Detection

Each club can import a given Caissa event only once. If you try to import an event your club has already imported, the import is rejected and the error names the existing tournament. To pick up newer data from Caissa, re-sync the existing tournament instead of importing it again.

Re-syncing from Caissa

An imported tournament stays linked to its Caissa event, so you can pull fresh data at any time — useful while an event is still running, or after results are corrected on Caissa.

1. Open the tournament. The Actions menu is the same on every tab, so it does not matter which one you are on.
2. Click Actions (the ... menu) and select Import → Re-sync from Caissa.

The re-sync is incremental: TournaChess compares what it already has against the current Caissa data and applies only the differences. New sections, players, rounds, and games are added; changed results and standings are updated; and games that no longer exist on Caissa are removed. The summary reports exactly what changed.

Re-sync only appears on tournaments that were imported from Caissa. Tournaments created in TournaChess, or imported from another source, have no Caissa event to sync against.

Limitations

• Players import as guest players. Caissa players are not matched to existing TournaChess member accounts, even when the same person has an account in your club. You can link a guest player to a member later from the Registrations tab.

• Re-sync is one-way. It pulls from Caissa and overwrites the corresponding TournaChess data. Edits you make in TournaChess to imported rounds, games, or standings will be replaced the next time you re-sync, and are never pushed back to Caissa. The exceptions are grade and team: because Caissa does not publish them in full, a value you enter by hand is kept rather than cleared.

• Only what Caissa publishes. Details Caissa does not expose — such as the event timezone, registration fees, or payment status — are not imported. See What Does Not Import for the fields most likely to affect you.

Related Guides

• Importing from Chess.com — Import completed Chess.com live tournaments.
• Importing from Lichess — Import completed Lichess Swiss tournaments.
• USCF Integration — Importing completed USCF-rated events, plus ratings and reporting.
• Grand Prix User Guide — Include imported events in a season-long series.

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