September 2026

September is still running. This post covers what has shipped so far and will be finished at the end of the month.

Email your players

Directors can write a formatted message and send it to every registered player in one action — or to specific sections, when only the U1200 field needs to hear something. Images are supported in the message body, and replies come back to your club's contact address rather than to TournaChess support. Available on the Club and Pro plans.

You can also choose a team or one player, and the new Send me a copy option gives you one copy at the Reply-to address by default. Turn it off for messages you do not need to keep. See Running Tournaments.

For a message to just one player, open their registration details from the Registrations or Sections tab and choose Email player. The composer names the recipient and asks you to confirm before sending to their registration's contact address. See Running Tournaments.

Displays

The projector and TV views gained the things a long event needs:

Carousel and auto-scroll modes, cycling through pairings, standings, and entry lists unattended, with a content-aware layout that avoids splitting a section across screens
An optional clock overlay
A standings key that stays visible on the TV/projector view, so players can read result, bye, and forfeit symbols without leaving the display
Display state is held separately from the tournament URL, so what is on the screen in the hall is not changed by what a director opens on their laptop
Standings can optionally highlight upsets: a lower-rated win shows the current rating gap, while a draw shows half the gap. The extra numbers stay hidden until you choose Show Upsets. See Running Tournaments.
A Double Forfeit action for entering the result from the projector view

Clubs publish a subscribable iCalendar feed of their tournaments — add it once in Google Calendar, Apple Calendar, or Outlook and every future event appears. Tournaments can set their own calendar title and description, or be hidden from the feed. The club calendar now shows event times and names directly in the day cells.

Bring a club occasion together

Directors can now publish a club Event with its own description, date, location, banner, and icon, then link the tournaments that belong to it. A standalone Event works too. Visitors get one home page for the occasion, while registration stays with each tournament. The club calendar and its subscribable feed show the Event alongside its tournaments as separate entries. See Club Management.

Create Event now starts with a choice between a simple Event and a full Tournament. Both appear together by date in the club’s Events tables and homepage lists, so players can find casual meetups and tournaments in one schedule.

More prizes

Best Debut, for the highest-scoring unrated player — and the one prize a section US Chess does not rate can still offer
Team Place trophies — 1st Place Team, 2nd Place Team — awarded on the section's team standings, and the one prize that needs no ratings at all
Manual awards let directors name an award such as “Youngest Participant” and choose its recipient in a section or across the tournament. Give the selected player cash, $0 recognition, or a trophy without asking the standings to decide. See Prize Calculation.
Team standings can hide their tiebreak columns
Individual prize winners now show their team or school beside their name, on the Prizes tab and printed payout sheet — ready for school announcements without opening each registration. See Prize Calculation.

Copy a tournament your way

Directors can duplicate an event as a fresh setup, bring its registered roster into a new unpaid event, or preserve its dates and completed results as an independent historical copy. Historical copies appear as another entry in player histories but leave Grand Prix associations behind, so Grand Prix points are not counted twice. See Creating Tournaments.

Recurring series

Changing a series template used to leave the tournaments already generated from it untouched, so a late change meant editing each one by hand — or deleting and regenerating them, which breaks the registration links you have already published. Sync from Template updates every upcoming tournament in the series in place, keeping each one's date, link, status, and registrations. See the Recurring Series guide.

Findable by people and by machines

The published guides are now also served as Markdown — append .md to any doc URL — and indexed in /llms.txt and /llms-full.txt for AI assistants. Public tournament and club pages are server-rendered with their own titles, canonical URLs, and honest sitemap dates, so a search engine that fetches one sees the event, not an empty shell. New use-case guides cover weekly club tournaments, scholastic clubs, and directing from any device.

A rebuilt dark theme

Dark mode was rebuilt around neutral surfaces and a blue that is actually readable on them, with contrast checked against WCAG thresholds rather than by eye.

Less repeated USCF setup

Club owners and admins can save their affiliate ID, event location, and tournament director IDs once in club settings. New tournaments receive those values automatically, while directors can adjust each tournament's rating-report details independently. See USCF Integration.

Club activity at a glance

Owners and Admins can now see recent registrations, daily sign-up activity, and tournament status counts right on their club page. The dashboard gives organizers a quick view of what is coming up and where registrations are moving, without opening each tournament. See Club Management.

Elsewhere

Tournament directors can now opt each Biggest Upset prize into counting a lower-rated player's played draw at half the rating gap. Existing prizes remain win-only until changed. See Prize Calculation.
Public tournament API integrations can read each registrant’s cached USCF state code for their own displays, without an extra US Chess lookup. See USCF Integration.
A signed-in parent can add rounds to a family member's per-round registration
Directors can assign a bye in a round where byes are otherwise restricted
Open a winner's registration details straight from the Prizes tab
The registrations tab shows a registered player count
New registrations appear at the top of the Registrations tab by default, with row numbers counting down so the oldest visible registration stays number 1. Choose another sort using the column headers. See Registration & Payments.
Extra Games gained a phone and tablet layout
Directors can revisit a completed tournament’s registration page from its management Registration tab. The preview is private and cannot accept new registrations. See Registration & Payments.