Today’s release was another Major Milestone with some significant changes and huge new features! There is so much to talk about that I’m going to break it into 3 posts. But I’ll give you the overview here.
1. Feature: Olympiad style team matches and pairings
Chess leagues, interclub matches and school competitions make up a large number of all chess tournaments around the world. Managing these team tournaments is insanely complex and time-consuming. Rather, I should say, it was complex and time consuming.
Team matches, like the Chess Olympiad, are where there are a fixed number of boards and the teams play Board 1 v 1, 2 v 2 and so forth. Pairings are done not for the individual players, but for the team.
All the usual Tornelo functionality you are used to from individual tournaments remains, such as; editing pairings, publishing pairings, playing online games etc … But now you can pair teams instead of individual players.
A full blog post explaining more of the features will follow soon.
2. Feature: Awarding trophies to players
At the end of your chess tournament you’ll want to award prizes to players. But prizes are only meaningful and valuable if they are scarce. If everyone gets a medal, then it doesn’t mean as much as if everyone is competing for a single trophy!
Tornelo now gives arbiters the ability to award trophies. But, on a very limited basis – to ensure these digital trophies hold the same value as they would in the real world.
To award trophies:
- You must be a verified organization (it’s free to verify)
- Each event is given a “budget”. We use the currency of “crowns”. Your budget is based on the number of players in your event (plan your trophy budget here)
- There is also a maximum number of trophies you can award in each event, again based on the size of the event
Some trophies are only available in large events, because we think it’s even more special to win a huge event!
3. Feature: Re-rating tournaments
Not many organizers will appreciate how huge and complex this feature is, but it is actually something we are really proud of. If you are managing your own rating system you’ll certainly understand how powerful this feature is!
From today onwards arbiters have the abililty to unrate, update and rerate an event. This will change tournament results in the past and automatically update any players impacted by that change.
Imagine we go back to 2012 and update a result for PlayerX… his rating at the end of this event is now 1300 and not 1250. This will impact all his opponents in the next event, and their opponents in future events and so on and on and on….
Tornelo now manages this automatically and updates everyone’s rating. Wow!
4. Feature: Custom team size in Team Battle
Team Battle is a really flexible, modern team format and is becoming more popular all the time.
Previously we hard-coded the Team Battle format to always count the best 4 players in each team. We’ve now made this a customisable setting, so you can count any number of players in your Team Battle events.
WORKING ON
- Continued work on Team events
- Printable lists and pairings
- New homepage, new design, new branding
As always, we’re keen to hear your feedback, feature requests or bug reports.
Kind regards,
DAVID CORDOVER
Founder