Importing from Caissa

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 or numeric event ID.

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 or numeric ID. Open the event on Caissa and copy the URL from your browser's address bar, or use the number after /live/ or /register/. Both URL types 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

Go to your club's Tournaments page.
Click the Import dropdown and select Import from Caissa.
Paste one Caissa event URL or numeric ID, or enter several separated by commas. Optionally select Use names from the latest completed club tournament to adopt a previously curated spelling when a player’s US Chess ID matches. This is off by default. Click Continue.
TournaChess reads each event in order and shows what it found, including section and player counts, a sample of any name changes, and notes about anything that will not come across (see What Does Not Import). Nothing has been saved yet at this point.
Review the summaries, optionally enter a read-enabled Caissa auth code for private details, and click Import, or Cancel to go back and change the input. Multiple events import one at a time, in the order entered. If one fails, the process stops; you can retry the remaining events without repeating earlier successful imports.
When the import completes, you'll see a summary of the imported tournaments and their section and player counts. For multiple events, click Done to return to your club; for a single event, click View Tournament to open it.

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.

Optional private details

On the confirmation screen, enter a Caissa auth code (optional) from Caissa's Developer API page. Use a token with read scope and access to every event in the batch. The preview still describes public data; the code is sent only when you click Import.

TournaChess uses the code only for that import batch and never saves it. It adds available player emails to private tournament guest records, plus grades, schools (as teams when missing), and event city, state, ZIP and affiliate ID. Caissa's documented registration API does not provide phone numbers. An email may come from the player's saved Caissa contact details when their registration has no email. Missing or invalid email addresses stay blank.

Private details are joined only to existing public-roster players in the same section, using a unique US Chess ID or, without an ID, a unique exact source name (ignoring case and extra spaces). For no-ID player emails, the name must also be unique across the event's public roster because the existing importer shares same-name guest records across sections. Ambiguous contacts are left blank. No TournaChess accounts are matched or changed, no notification preferences are changed, and importing does not send messages. Player emails are not added to public standings or public registration responses.

An invalid code, inaccessible event, incomplete response or API error stops that event before anything is created; already imported events in a batch remain. Re-enter the code to retry, or leave it blank to import public data instead. Closing the dialog or finishing the operation discards the code. Later re-syncs use the public API only and retain imported email, grade and team values when public data has no replacement. Event city, state, ZIP and affiliate ID are also kept when re-sync has no replacement values. You can still import without a code exactly as before.

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. If the optional completed-tournament spelling is selected, only matching US Chess IDs adopt that name; the original Caissa name remains recorded, and later re-syncs keep applying the same option. When no historical spelling is selected or found, names use the same conservative capitalization rules as online registration, even without a US Chess ID. For example, Dr. JOHN MACARTHUR VII becomes John MacArthur VII. The final word is treated as the surname, with a recognized suffix kept alongside it. Mixed-case spellings and likely uppercase initials are preserved; comma-formatted and single-word names are left alone. The preview shows a sample of name changes before import, and re-sync uses the same rules.
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

Without an auth code, 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 — Without an auth code, the public API provides no 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 — The public API 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 in the public API, so these are blank without an auth code. Fill them in from the tournament settings if you plan to submit a USCF rating report.
Time control and rating ceiling — These are not included in this import; 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.

Open the tournament. The Actions menu is the same on every tab, so it does not matter which one you are on.
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. Grade and team values you enter by hand are kept because Caissa does not publish them in full.
Limited detail scope. The event timezone, registration fees and payment status are not imported, even with an auth code. See What Does Not Import for the fields most likely to affect you.

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.

Still have questions? Visit our Contact page to get in touch with TournaChess support.