The biggest addition in version 5.1 is the knock-out (cup) pairing system, for both individual and team events.
Players — or teams — are seeded into a bracket: the loser of each match is out, the winner moves on, and the last one standing wins. The number of rounds follows from the size of the field, the top seeds skip round one when the field is not a power of two, and the ranking is by the round reached: winner, runner-up, third place, out in round N…
Four variations are available:
Because chess games can be drawn, a knock-out needs a way to decide level matches. Sharly Chess 5.1 introduces advancement tie-breaks: the tie-breaks configured on a knock-out tournament do not rank the standings, they decide who goes through — rating, pairing number, games won, performance… — and a Manual tie-break lets the arbiter designate the winner of a play-off (Armageddon, blitz games…) played over the board.
The settings cover what a cup organiser expects: a third-place playoff, the colour assignment rule (alternate colours, higher seed with White, or drawing of lots), and grouped seeding by club, federation or affiliation, so that club-mates play each other first and the two strongest groups can only meet in the final — with a live preview of the resulting bracket.
A new Knock-out Bracket document prints the bracket diagram, or the schedule of matches round by round.
👉 Read the new Knock-out page to get started.
Place cards no longer require editing template files by hand: version 5.1 includes a visual editor.
From the Templates button of the Documents dialog, you can create a new template or duplicate a built-in one, then design it on screen: add text and images, drag them into place, choose fonts, sizes, colours and alignments, and preview the card with sample data. Templates can be imported and exported to share them with other organisers.
The editor writes the same TOML templates as before, so existing custom templates keep working and can still be fine-tuned by hand.
👉 See the Place Cards Customization Guide.
The language, federation and date format settings have moved from the browser to the main application window — the window that opens when you launch Sharly Chess — alongside the data folder and update settings.
Plugins are now installed and uninstalled from the same window, from a new Plugins page listing the available plugins with their type, federation, dependencies and documentation.
The event export (SCE) has moved too, from the tournament tab to the event’s configuration window.
👉 See Accessing the User Interface and Plugins.
The administration interface now adapts to phone screens: pairings can be checked and results entered from a smartphone in the playing hall.
Team competitions — the Jean-Claude Loubatière Cup, the Mixed Cup (Coupe de la Parité), the Women championship (N1F / N2F) and any other competition of the site’s team module — can now be uploaded to the FFE website. Enter the group director’s account in the tournament’s properties, choose the competition, division and group, and Sharly Chess registers the teams and fills in the match reports — players, results and scores — round after round, manually or automatically.
Team tournaments can also be exported to a Papi file, which describes them as an individual Swiss tournament.
👉 See The FFE Plugin.
The player search can now be narrowed by federation, gender, age category and club — plus licence and league for FFE searches. The filters can be filled in one go from the criteria of any tournament of the event, which makes registering players section by section much quicker.
When distributing players across balanced tournaments, players of the same club can now be separated as much as possible. A reminder to update the players’ data from the latest rating lists is shown before distributing them — and before generating place cards.
Two improvements for round-robin tournaments:
Among the other improvements:
👉 Check out the full changelog for all the other new features and fixes.
We hope you’ll enjoy this new version. As always, please feel free to share your feedback on Discord, by email at support@sharly-chess.com, or on GitHub.
Sharly Chess 5.0 users will be offered the update automatically; new users can download the latest version from this page.
You can support the Sharly Chess project by using the Sharly-Chess.com registration platform for your tournaments, or by making a donation to the Sharly Chess association.
A huge thank you to everyone who contributes, provides feedback, helps other users, or supports the project financially: your support helps us keep Sharly Chess free and open source.
]]>Tutorial in French:
The biggest addition in version 5 is full support for team events.
Players can now compete as members of teams, teams can be paired against each other, and rankings can be calculated using team scores and dedicated tie-breaks.
Sharly Chess 5.0 introduces:
👉 See the new Team events section to get started.
The Molter system is a fixed-table pairing method designed for small team events played over a limited number of rounds: everyone plays in every round and nobody sits out.
It is named after Charles Molter, whose 1978 documents were turned into ready-to-use tables in 1991 by international arbiter Jean-Claude Templeur and distributed by the Fédération Française des Échecs. Despite its usefulness, the system has remained little known outside France.
Sharly Chess now generates Molter tables automatically for any supported number of teams, making the system easily available to organisers everywhere.
👉 Read Molter tables to learn when and why to use it.
For French events, the FFE plugin adds dedicated rule sets for several official team competitions:
It also provides the official Loubatière pairing sheet.
Version 5 also introduces championships, allowing results from several tournaments to be combined into an overall competition.
A championship can span multiple tournaments and multiple events, whether individual or team-based. This makes it possible, for example, to organise a season-long series of tournaments and automatically determine an overall winner.
Sharly Chess:
Individual tournaments remain independent while contributing towards the overall championship.
The user interface has received numerous improvements:
FIDE player titles are now handled accurately.
Version 5 adds new possibilities for accelerated tournaments:
Points are now treated as a ranking criterion in their own right, alongside the available tie-break systems.
This provides greater flexibility over how tournament rankings are calculated.
Bonus and penalty points can also be awarded to players, with support for the TRF26 299 record.
The handling of fixed tables has been substantially improved:
For French tournaments, the FFE plugin includes a compatibility mode designed to keep table numbering consistent with the FFE website.
By default, the original table is therefore still left empty when players are moved to a fixed table. In this compatibility mode, duplicate table numbers may also occur when fixed table numbers fall within the normal table range.
This behaviour can be changed in the FFE plugin section of the event configuration.
FIDE compliance of title norm reports has been improved:
Prize management has also been improved:
Screen families have been renamed Multi-Screens.
Menu support has been completely redesigned for a better experience, and existing screens have also been improved:
A new Chess960 plugin allows starting positions to be displayed, either selected by the arbiter or determined by a draw.
Among many other improvements:
👉 Check out the full changelog for all the other new features and improvements.
We hope you’ll enjoy this new version. As always, please feel free to share your feedback on Discord, by email at support@sharly-chess.com, or on GitHub.
New Sharly Chess users can directly download and install the latest version of the software from this page.
For existing Sharly Chess users, the recommended procedure to preserve your events is as follows:
Many of you have asked how you can support the Sharly Chess project.
One way is to use the Sharly-Chess.com registration platform for your tournaments and benefit from its online registration and payment features.
You can now also make a donation to the Sharly Chess association.
A huge thank you to everyone who contributes, provides feedback, helps other users, or supports the project financially. Your support helps us continue developing and maintaining Sharly Chess as free and open-source tournament management software.
]]>A beta version is already available online, and we are looking for testers to try out these new features. Feel free to contact us and join our Discord to get an early look at this new version, we look forward to assisting you!
In the meantime, you can go ahead and update Sharly Chess to version 4.2.7; this is an essential step for the upcoming transition to version 5.
We wish you a wonderful August and a great French Championship in Vichy if you are lucky enough to be participating, and we look forward to seeing you soon for the official release of Sharly Chess 5.0!
]]>Sharly Chess now offers many features you will not find on any other Tournament Handling Program.
Sharly Chess is now fully compatible with TRF26 (Tournament Report File) format, for individual competitions.
You can now print team ranking documents on individual tournaments by specifying:
👉 Check out the full changelog for other new features and improvements.
We hope you’ll appreciate this new version, as always feel free to share any feedback on Discord, by email (support@sharly-chess.com), or on GitHub.
]]>It is now possible to handle player presence outside of a designated check-in period, making it easier to handle late arrivals or players leaving.
The Check-in / Results entry screens have been split into distinct screen types.
Tournament and prize criteria have been made more accessible.
Tie-breaks have been updated to match the latest changes of the FIDE Handbook.
It includes 3 new tie-breaks (STD, TPN, RTNG) and changes to Buchholz and Sonneborn-Berger.
Creating tie-breaks has also been simplified, as it is now possible to save your favorite tie-breaks into sets which can be re-used across multiple events.
A lot of improvements have also been done to our registration platform Sharly-Chess.com:
All the new features are synchronized with version 4.1 of the Sharly Chess application.
👉 Check out the full changelog for all the details.
We hope you’ll appreciate this new version, as always feel free to share any feedback on Discord, by email (support@sharly-chess.com), or on GitHub.
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