Coronate: a Swiss chess tournament manager
Coronate is a free, open-source app for managing Swiss-style chess tournaments.
“Myself and a few other engineers working at GitHub have been using this to run a chess tournament for ourselves. I wanted to say thanks. 🥇 🏆 ✨”
Stanley Goldman🧐 About
I began working on Coronate shortly after hosting a tournament as a public library program. I discovered a dearth of free software, so I and decided to change that. Library employees deal with limited budgets and restrictive computer access, so purchasing, installing, and learning to use specialized tournament software is usually a considerable barrier-to-entry.
Coronate aims to solve this problem. It’s free, open source, and runs on almost any system. Although it (probably) won’t replace a professional app in a rated tournament, it fills the gap for small clubs or public events.
Coronate is in a “proof-of-concept” phase. If you would like to contribute your feature ideas, just file an issue!
♟ How to use it
Coronate tournaments use the Swiss-style system. For the unfamiliar, my article on running your first chess tournament can explain how the logistics work. While understanding those is helpful, Coronate should effortlessly manage the nitty-gritty for you.
Rounds
After you make a tournament and add your players, you can create a new round. There is a basic interface to help you pair players, but you should almost always use the “auto-pair players” button. Typically, just resort to manual pairing if the auto-pair results cause a problem.
Once the players are paired, the pairings will be listed in a numbered order. These numbers would typically correspond to specific tables or chess sets you have. The round screen provides controls to rearrange these pairings, swap players’ colors, or unpair the players. Of course, you can also set the result of each match.
Once each match has been completed, you can begin pairing the next round.
You can add or remove players from your tournament at any time (such as late entries or players who have left).
Other tournament pages
Besides the rounds, there are a few other pages for each tournament:
- Tournament status displays the current standings alongside the most recent round’s matches. This serves as a quick overview of the most pertinent information, something to display in the background while the tournament is in progress.
- Crosstable displays a table showing every player’s results with every other player, along with their rating gain or loss.
- Score detail displays exactly how the standings are calculated: which tiebreak methods are used, what order they’re in, and what the result of each scoring method is for each player.
Players
Outside of tournaments, there is also a page for managing players. If you open a player profile, you can specify which other players they should never be paired with. For example, you can use this to prevent matches between family members.
Ratings are calculated after each match and saved to each player’s profile. This uses a very basic rating algorithm, and isn’t predictive of a USCF or FIDE rating.
You can edit other player data as well, but you typically won’t need to.
🗃 Managing tournament data
Unlike most web apps, Coronate doesn’t keep your data in “the cloud” (e.g. someone else’s computer). Instead, your data is saved to your browser’s storage. This mostly works well, but it comes with caveats: a) moving data from one device to another is frustrating, b) backing up and making copies of data is frustrating, and c) browsers manage their data differently from each other and are sometimes eager to quietly delete or restrict storage.
You can manually load and save your data through its “options” screen. If you create a tournament on your work laptop and want to ensure its records are preserved, just go to the options and save the file somewhere safe. At any point, you can open Coronate again and load the data.
🥰 Enjoy using Coronate?
Coronate is free software, but you’re welcome to show your appreciation.
🌅 The future
Coronate is currently 1.0 status, mostly bug-free and with all of the basic functionality. There are still plenty of features that can go into the next version, but I haven’t decided yet what to focus on.
One common suggestion has been to make it compatible with other games that use Swiss-style tournament structures. If you have a specific game that you would like to see it support, just let me know.
🤓 Behind the scenes
Scoring
I modeled the scorekeeping code after the specifications by the USCF. When appropriate, the code should have comments indicating the specific section of the rulebook they come from. Not all scoring rules are implemented (yet), just the commonly used ones.
USCF’s scoring guidelines can be found on their rulebook, which is freely downloadable here.
Pairing
Similar to scoring, the auto-pairing functions aim to comply with USCF recommendations. Pairing is a much trickier beast than scoring, however. The current implementation is “good enough” for now, and still needs more work.
Source code
Coronate is written with ReScript and React. All code is AGPL v3.0 licensed which allows anyone to download and modify it. I welcome contributions in code, as well as suggestions and bug reports. Visit the repository page to get started.
Screenshots
