April 2026
The biggest month of the year so far. April brought subscriptions, the prize engine, and a redesigned front door.
Plans and billing
TournaChess now has Free, Club, and Pro plans, billed per club rather than per director or per player. Clubs get a Billing tab with plan cards, promo code support, and confirmation emails on every change — activation, upgrade, downgrade, cancellation, and resume. Current prices and limits live on the pricing page.
Prize distribution
Cash prizes for USCF-rated sections are calculated for you, following USCF rules 32B1–32B5. Configure the prize structure, and TournaChess works out who wins what — splitting tied prizes correctly and enforcing eligibility — using maximum-weight matching rather than a greedy pass, so no player is assigned a prize that leaves the field worse off overall.
- Class prizes derived from USCF rating classes
- Per-prize control over whether unrated players are eligible
- Payment status tracking and per-result notes, so you can see who has actually been paid
- Split prizes always round up, so tied players receive equal amounts
The Prize Calculation guide explains the rules it implements.
Tiebreaks you choose
Standings are no longer stuck with one tiebreak order. Sections configure which tiebreaks apply and in what order — Modified Median, Solkoff, Cumulative, Sonneborn-Berger and more — and the standings columns follow. Click any tiebreak value to see how it was calculated, with the USCF rule cited for rated sections. A custom tiebreak column lets a director enter values by hand for anything the engine does not compute.
Team standings
Sections can aggregate individual results into team standings, scoring the top N players per team, with a Teams tab on the tournament page showing each team's roster and score.
Extra games
Rated games played outside the pairing structure — between bye recipients, or with a house player — can be recorded as Extra Games, complete with ratings, result entry, and inclusion in the USCF export.
Club branding
Clubs on a paid plan can upload a logo, which appears on the club page, on tournament pages, and in the projector and TV display header. A separate setting controls whether the club's name is shown alongside it.
A new home page
The marketing site was rebuilt: a proper hero, a product preview, feature sections with real screenshots, testimonials from clubs actually running events on TournaChess, and a sitemap so search engines can find all of it.
Elsewhere
- Sections can be merged after rounds have started, and duplicated or deleted from the Sections tab
- The mobile pairings view was redesigned as compact two-line cards
- Signing in with Chess.com verifies your email address automatically when the provider already has