How to run a knockout tournament at your chess club

Single elimination is the classic bracket: lose a match and you’re out. You can add a match for third place. Double elimination gives everyone a second chance: lose once and you drop to the losers’ bracket (the pink second-chance sheet on the wall chart); lose twice and you’re out. Its final can be reset: if the player from the losers’ side wins the final, they play again, since both have now lost once.

Save one under House rules and change what you need: the clock, one or two games a match, the cap, who can enter, check-in, and which boards it reserves. Then make an event with it, as in the Swiss guide: a name, a date, and, if you like, Side games for everyone else, so whoever is knocked out (or never entered) keeps playing casual games on the other boards.

The house rules ask how the bracket is drawn. Three choices:

• At random: by lot. Nobody can say the draw was rigged, and the strongest two might meet in round one. That’s knockouts.
• By rating: the strongest are kept apart until the late rounds. It uses only the ratings your Castle is allowed to see (a player who keeps theirs private counts as unrated), and unrated players go after the rated ones, by lot.
• The TD sets it: you put the field in order yourself on the Players tab before the start (“The draw’s order”); anyone you leave out goes after, by lot.

Entries, check-in and the night itself work as they do for a Swiss: Open entries, people accept the gambit to enter (a waitlist once it’s full), they check in from tonight’s lobby, and you press Start. One difference: there are no late entries in a knockout, since the bracket is drawn once.

At the start, the bracket is drawn and the first matches go straight to the reserved boards. Each player’s phone shows their board and color, and the rest of the matches follow by themselves as boards free up. You don’t pair anything.

With side games on, nobody stands around. A player whose next match is still waiting for an opponent can play a casual game on the other boards meanwhile; when their match is ready, it waits for that game to finish rather than pulling them away mid-move. Once someone is out, they’re simply a casual player for the rest of the evening, which is the friendliest way to lose a knockout.

The console’s Bracket tab is the evening at a glance:

• On the boards: every match being played, with Move (to another reserved board; the players, the lobby and the TV follow it) and Forfeit.
• Up next: matches waiting for a free board. “Nothing waiting” means the next matches fill in as results come.
• Needs you: a disputed or voided game, with a link to settle it.
• The wall chart: the whole bracket, live. Tap a name for that player’s path. Arrow keys work too.

A knockout match needs a winner, so the house rules say what breaks a drawn match:

1. 1

   Blitz, then Armageddon: two quick games, one with each color. Still level? Armageddon.

2. 2

   Armageddon: one game where Black has less time but goes through on a draw. It’s never rated.

You don’t start the tiebreak by hand: the next game goes to the board as the match needs it, and the wall chart marks how it was won (“Won on armageddon”).

Someone entered, checked in, and then went to get a sandwich for forty minutes. Press Forfeit on their match and answer Who came? Whoever came goes through, and the match is marked “won by forfeit”.

A forfeit is never a game: nothing is rated and no crowns are earned, and a game already on the board is called off. The printed bracket and the wall chart both say “won by forfeit”, so nobody thinks the result was played.

Hold new matches stops anything new from starting. Games on a board finish, and a match already under way still plays its tiebreak or Armageddon. Resume carries on.

It’s for the fire alarm, the pizza arriving, or a knockout across two nights: closing the night with matches still to play? Hold first. The next night picks up where this one stopped.

If you ever see “New tournament games are on hold” that you didn’t press, that one is ours: Castle Gambit has paused new tournament games everywhere for a moment. Games already on a board carry on.

Players and your Castle’s members can open the bracket and the places on the tournament’s gambit, signed in. On a phone it shows one round at a time. It names the players and never shows a rating or a seed number.

The club TV gives the knockout its own block, and announces the winner at the end. With a second screen, the code card on Tonight has a TV link for the knockout only. For the wall, Print gives the bracket, every match by round, and the places on their own page. Printing is free; the Places and Matches downloads (CSV) come with Keep, which we switch on for a Castle when you ask.

When it’s over, the places stand, and the knockout’s games count toward the social rating like any rated game (Armageddon and forfeits excepted). Hand over the trophy. If you don’t have a trophy, hand over a cookie; nobody has ever complained.