Recurring Series

If your club runs regular events -- a Thursday evening blitz, a biweekly rated classical, a monthly scholastic -- you already know how repetitive it can be to create the same tournament over and over again. A recurring series automates that work for you.

Think of it like a calendar event that repeats. You point the series at an existing tournament to use as a template, choose a schedule, and TournaChess generates new tournaments automatically. Each generated tournament is a fully independent event with its own registrations, pairings, and results. The series just handles the creation part so you do not have to.

What is a Recurring Series?

A recurring series takes an existing tournament -- your template -- and duplicates it on a schedule. Everything about the template tournament is copied into each generated instance: sections, time controls, pairing methods, payment options, custom fields, registration settings, and more. The only things that change are the name and date.

Common use cases

Weekly club nights: A Thursday evening blitz that generates a new 4-round Swiss every week.
Biweekly rated events: A classical tournament every other Saturday, rated through USCF.
Monthly scholastic tournaments: A scholastic event on the first Saturday of every month, with separate sections for different age groups.

How it differs from Grand Prix

Recurring Series and Grand Prix are complementary features that solve different problems:

Recurring Series is about scheduling. It automates the creation of tournaments so you do not have to manually set up the same event every week.
Grand Prix is about standings tracking. It accumulates player scores across multiple tournaments into a season-long leaderboard.

They work well together. A recurring series can generate tournaments that automatically feed into a Grand Prix, giving you both automated scheduling and cumulative standings without any extra effort.

Creating a Recurring Series

Create Recurring Series

To create a recurring series, go to your club's Recurring Series page and click "Create Recurring Series." The creation wizard walks you through three steps.

Step 1: Select a template tournament

The first step is choosing which tournament to use as the blueprint for the series. Every setting from this tournament -- sections, time controls, pairing methods, rating types, entry fees, payment options, custom fields, registration settings, and description -- will be copied into each generated tournament.

You can search and filter the list of your club's tournaments to find the right one. Select a tournament by clicking on it in the list.

If you do not already have a suitable tournament to use as a template, click Create New Tournament. This opens the tournament creation dialog. After creating the tournament, you will be taken to its settings page where you can configure sections, payment options, and other details exactly how you want them. Once your template tournament is fully configured, return to the Recurring Series page to start the wizard again.

Tip: It is worth taking time to get the template tournament right before creating the series. Every detail you configure on the template -- rating types, BYE settings, entry fees, custom registration fields -- carries over to every generated tournament automatically.

Step 2: Set the schedule

Choose how often you want tournaments to be generated:

Frequency	Description	Example
Weekly	Every week on a specific day	Every Thursday
Biweekly	Every two weeks on a specific day	Every other Saturday
Monthly (by date)	A specific day of the month	The 15th of each month
Monthly (by weekday)	A specific weekday occurrence in the month	The 2nd Tuesday of each month
Custom	A custom interval in days	Every 10 days

For weekly and biweekly schedules, you select the day of the week. For monthly schedules, you choose either a fixed date or a weekday pattern (like "the first Saturday" or "the third Wednesday"). The monthly weekday option includes a "Last" choice for months with varying lengths -- "last Friday of the month" always works correctly regardless of whether the month has four or five Fridays.

You also set:

Start and end times for each generated tournament (in 24-hour format).
Series start date -- the earliest date tournaments can be generated from.
Series end date (optional) -- when the series should stop generating. Leave this empty for an open-ended series.
Generation horizon -- how many weeks ahead to keep tournaments generated (1 to 52 weeks, default 8). For example, with an 8-week horizon, the system always maintains roughly 8 weeks of upcoming tournaments.

Step 3: Name template and options

Define how generated tournaments should be named. You write a name pattern using placeholders that get replaced with the actual date of each tournament:

Placeholder	Replaced with	Example
`{date}`	Full date	Jan 15, 2025
`{month}`	Month name	January
`{day}`	Day number	15

For example, a pattern of Thursday Blitz - {date} produces tournaments named "Thursday Blitz - Jan 9, 2025", "Thursday Blitz - Jan 16, 2025", and so on. A live preview shows how the next three occurrences will be named as you type.

By default, the name pattern is pre-filled based on the template tournament's name with - {date} appended. You can change it to whatever you like.

You can also choose whether generated tournaments are created in Draft or Active status:

Draft (default): Gives you a chance to review each tournament before making it visible to players.
Active: Tournaments go live immediately when generated.

Tip: Start with Draft mode when you first set up a series. Once you are confident the template is configured correctly, you can switch to Active mode to skip the manual review step.

What Gets Copied from the Template

When a new tournament is generated, it inherits all of these settings from the template tournament:

Section configuration: Names, rating types (Unrated, USCF, FIDE, USCF+FIDE), time controls, pairing methods, rating eligibility ranges, max players, BYE settings (requests, point values, round restrictions), and USCF scholastic settings.
Payment options: Tournament-level and section-level payment options, including early bird and late registration windows (date offsets are adjusted automatically).
Custom fields: All custom registration fields and their configurations.
Registration settings: Public registration status, registration mode (full tournament or per-round).
Tournament details: Description, announcement text, max players.
USCF settings: Affiliate ID, city, state, zip code.
Grand Prix settings: If the template is linked to a Grand Prix, generated tournaments inherit that linkage.

The only things that change are the tournament name (from your name pattern) and the dates (calculated from the schedule).

Editing individual tournaments

Each generated tournament is fully independent. After it is generated, you can edit it freely -- change the name, adjust section settings, modify entry fees, or update any other detail. Your changes only affect that specific tournament. Future tournaments generated by the series will continue to use the original template settings.

Managing Your Series

Manage Recurring Series

Once your series is running, the series management page gives you tools to control it.

View upcoming and past tournaments

The management page shows all generated tournaments in chronological order, with their current status (Draft, Active, or Complete). You can see at a glance what is coming up and which tournaments need attention.

Skip specific dates

When you need to skip a date -- for a holiday, a venue closure, a special event, or any other reason -- you can mark that date to be skipped. No tournament will be generated for skipped dates, and the series continues normally on the next scheduled occurrence.

For example, if your weekly Thursday series falls on Thanksgiving, you can skip that date. The series will generate tournaments for every other Thursday as usual.

Pause and resume

If you need to take a longer break, you can pause the entire series. While paused, no new tournaments are generated automatically. You can still trigger manual generation if needed. When you are ready to resume, reactivate the series and it picks up where it left off.

Status	Behavior
Active	Generating tournaments on schedule
Paused	No automatic generation; can be manually triggered
Ended	Series is finished; no more tournaments will be generated

Generate now

You can manually trigger tournament generation at any time without waiting for the daily automatic run. This is useful after editing a series or when you want to see the next batch of tournaments right away. Manual generation also works while the series is paused.

Edit the series

You can change the schedule, name template, times, horizon, skip dates, and draft/active preference at any time. Changes only affect future tournament generation -- tournaments that have already been generated keep their existing settings.

End the series

When you are done with a series, you can end it. Ending a series gives you options for what happens to existing tournaments:

Keep all tournaments: Tournaments remain in your club, just unlinked from the series.
Delete drafts: Remove only Draft tournaments; keep Active and Complete ones.
Delete non-complete: Remove all tournaments that have not been completed.

How Auto-Generation Works

TournaChess runs a daily process that checks all active recurring series. For each series, it calculates what tournament dates fall within the generation horizon and creates any that do not already exist.

For example, with a weekly series starting March 6 and an 8-week horizon:

On March 2, the system generates tournaments for March 6 through April 23 (8 weeks out).
Each day, the horizon extends forward by one day, and new tournaments are created as dates come into range.
The system never creates duplicates -- if a tournament already exists for a given date, it is skipped.

If the series has a defined end date and that date has passed, the series is automatically transitioned to Ended status and no further tournaments are generated.