Online Ratings
Plenty of events have no official rating at all: a club night, a scholastic fun tournament, a summer camp championship. The players still have ratings -- on Chess.com and Lichess.org -- and those are usually a far better guide to strength than nothing.
An Online-rated section pairs on exactly those ratings. Set the section's rating type to Online Rated, choose which ratings to use and in what order, and TournaChess looks each player up and seeds the section accordingly.
Online-rated sections are never submitted to USCF, FIDE, or NWSRS. Players need no federation ID to play in one.
Choosing Rating Sources
Both sites publish several ratings per account, one per time control. Rather than guess which one you mean, an Online-rated section carries an ordered priority list of rating sources. For example:
- Chess.com Rapid
- Lichess.org Rapid
A player's rating is the first source on that list they actually have a rating in. In the example above, a player who plays Rapid on Chess.com is rated from there; a player who only plays on Lichess falls through to the second entry; a player who has neither is Unrated.
You can choose from eight sources:
| Site | Available ratings |
|---|---|
| Chess.com | Rapid, Blitz, Bullet, Daily |
| Lichess.org | Bullet, Blitz, Rapid, Classical |
Setting the list up
- Open the section for editing and set Rating Type to Online Rated.
- Go to the section's Ratings tab.
- Use Add a rating source to add entries, and the arrows on each row to put them in the order you want.
New Online sections start with Chess.com Rapid followed by Lichess.org Rapid.
Listing the same site twice
This is allowed and often useful. A section for young players might use:
- Chess.com Rapid
- Chess.com Blitz
- Lichess.org Rapid
A player who only ever plays Blitz on Chess.com is rated from their Blitz rating rather than being left Unrated. Put your preferred time control first and the fallbacks after it.
Tip: Order matters more than length. Whichever source is first will supply the rating for most of your field, so put the time control closest to your event's at the top.
Collecting Usernames
TournaChess can only look a player up if it knows their username. When you add a site to a section's priority list, that site's username question is automatically turned on for the section's registration form, and it cannot be switched off while the site is still listed.
The question is set to Optional by default, so a player who only has one of the two accounts can still register. You can raise it to Required on the section's Registration tab if you would rather not accept entries without it.
Players who registered before you added the site, or who left the field blank, will not have a rating until someone fills their username in. You can add it yourself in the registrations table.
Provisional Ratings
Lichess marks a rating as provisional when a player has not yet completed enough games for it to settle. TournaChess uses provisional ratings normally -- they are still the best available estimate, and for many scholastic players every rating they have is provisional.
Provisional ratings are marked with a dagger (†) in the ratings popover so you can see which ones they are. Chess.com does not publish an equivalent flag, so its ratings are never marked.
Seeing All of a Player's Ratings
Next to each online rating is an information icon. Clicking it opens a panel showing every rating the player holds on each site your section is configured to read, with the one being used for this section marked with an asterisk.
This is the quickest way to sanity-check your priority list. If you see a field full of players whose Blitz ratings are hundreds of points away from their Rapid ratings, your list may be pointed at the wrong time control.
The panel opens even for an Unrated player, and tells you which sites were searched -- usually the answer is that no username was supplied, or the account has no games in any of the listed time controls.
Keeping Ratings Current
Automatic refresh
Online ratings for active tournaments refresh automatically once a day.
Refreshing stops for a section once its first round has been paired. Online ratings move much faster than official ones, and a player's displayed rating drifting away from the one that actually seeded them, mid-event, causes more confusion than it solves. Sections are frozen individually, so a section whose first round is still days away keeps refreshing while another section of the same tournament is already underway.
Refreshing by hand
You can refresh at any time, including after pairing has started:
- One player -- the refresh icon next to their rating in the registrations table.
- Everyone shown -- the refresh icon in the Online Rating column header. Viewing a single section refreshes that section; viewing all of them refreshes the whole tournament.
- A whole tournament -- Refresh Ratings in the tournament actions menu.
Changing a section's priority list also refreshes that section automatically, since the change decides which rating every player in it is paired on.
Entering a Rating by Hand
Sometimes there is no account to look up: a player without a Chess.com or Lichess account, or a visitor whose username nobody has. You can type a rating straight into the Online Rating column, and it will be used for pairings like any other.
A rating you enter is kept as long as none of the section's sources produces one for that player. If the player later supplies a username and a source does return a rating, that rating takes over -- the section goes back to being automatically rated for them. The ratings popover says when a rating was entered by hand, so you can tell the two apart.
When a Site Cannot Be Reached
Chess.com and Lichess are occasionally slow, rate-limited, or down. When that happens while a player is being added, the player is still added -- but without an online rating, and TournaChess says so at the time rather than leaving you to notice later:
- Registering one player -- guest registration and self-registration both report that the rating could not be fetched.
- Adding several at once -- bulk guest registration and Add Players report how many could not be looked up.
- Importing a roster -- the affected rows carry a warning in the import preview and result.
- Importing results from Chess.com or Lichess -- the completed-import panel says the online ratings are incomplete.
- Editing a guest's username or moving them between sections -- the save succeeds and warns that the rating was not re-resolved, so the row can still be showing the previous account's rating.
- A player paying online -- the player only sees their payment receipt, so the warning goes to directors subscribed to TD notifications instead.
In every case the fix is the same: refresh the section's ratings, by hand, before you pair. This matters most after the first round has been paired, because automatic refresh has stopped for that section by then and nothing will fill the rating in on its own.
Frequently Asked Questions
Can a section be both USCF-rated and Online-rated? No. Online Rated is a standalone rating type. An event you intend to submit to US Chess should be USCF-rated; TournaChess will use official ratings for it.
Do players need a TournaChess account linked to Chess.com? No. All that is needed is the username, which players supply on the registration form. Linking a Chess.com account to a TournaChess profile fills that in automatically, but it is not required.
What happens if a player's account is private or deleted? Their rating cannot be read, so they become Unrated at the next refresh -- unless you have entered a rating by hand, which is kept.
Do online ratings count for prizes and standings? An Online-rated section's rating behaves as the section's rating everywhere it is used: pairings and seeding, standings order, wall charts, and printed pairing and registration sheets. A section's minimum and maximum rating are shown on the registration page as guidance, the same as for any other rating type.
One limit worth knowing before you plan an event around it: section prize configuration -- Class and Under prizes -- is available on USCF-rated sections only, as it already is for FIDE-rated and NWSRS-rated sections. You cannot set up a Class or Under prize on an Online-rated section. Where such a prize does exist -- on a section that was USCF-rated when the prize was set up and has since been switched to Online -- it is banded on the online rating, not on a leftover USCF one, and the printed payout sheet shows that same rating beside the winner. Upset and Best Female prizes are configured for the whole tournament and are unaffected.
Are results reported back to Chess.com or Lichess? No. TournaChess reads ratings from those sites; it does not write anything to them. Your event has no effect on players' online ratings.