How To Run Live Tournaments On ChessKid!

 

Hi Coaches!

Site-generated and coach-generated live tournaments (in Fast Chess) are still being "officially" worked on, but for now, here's how one coach uses the features that currently have to run a league all over the United Kingdom!

Martin Fields of "SchoolsOnlineChess" explains how:

I stood outside the chess hall at a tournament talking to one of the other chess dads waiting for our boys to finish their games. The subject turned to the school chess club.

“Our school chess club is great, but Matthew has come on so fast. There is only one other player he can have a meaningful game with, and they play each other so often that they get bored and ending up not benefitting at all.”

“It is a shame they can’t play more competitive games in the school against other schools as a team.”

Light bulb moment!

Who will be the school online champion of the U.K.?

Six months later Schools Online Chess Club was born using ChessKid as the playing platform. Using our independent website www.schoolsonlinechessclub.co.uk we organize primary schools to play online against each other in mini-leagues of six teams up to three times in a school year.

How does it work? We ask the schools to register using the “sign up” form on the website which is purposefully designed to collect only the very minimum amount of information we require: School name, contact details, and the day/time they wish to play. (If you coach multiple schools, you would already have this info for a league -- FMM.)

Setting up the clubs and users:

Once they have registered, we create for them a club on ChessKid using the avatar from their school’s website.

Martin creates new clubs and accounts just for the league, regardless of if the child already has a ChessKid account for regular use.

We then create five generic user names (using the "add kid" button) for the players which will take the format of SchoolName-Bd1 (note that they are NOT attached to specific kid names).

We join them to two clubs: their school and very importantly we add them to a second club which contains all the schools who have selected the same playing day. For example, the Monday Mini League.

The different days of the league. 

Note: It is important for us that for online safety as we are dealing with schools we do not allow children to use their current ChessKid accounts if they are already registered. After the user names have been approved by ChessKid, the club login cards will be emailed to the club supervisor with an introductory email.

We manage matchups and standings on our website.

An example of the standings from our in-house calculations, but this can be done with pencil and paper too, of course.

Playing the games:

When we first started Schools Online Chess Club we intended to use the Chesskid “slow chess” format as it auto-matched the players using the match option; however, it soon became very clear that “slow chess” is not ideal for live chess as the moves came in without a fast enough clock. We, therefore, decided to change to the “fast chess” option.

This did come with its own challenges however because now we were asking 30 primary school children to find their own correct opponents! In order to match a game, all the players need to be in the fast chess section and click on the clubmates tab. All the players playing on that day will appear in a list and the players will need to find the name of the school they are playing and their opposing board number.

For example, SchoolOne-Bd1 vs. SchoolTwo-Bd1.

The student playing board 1 for Wrington just has to wait for his opponent (board 1 for the opposing school) to send a challenge.

At first, we were worried the children would struggle with this matching; however, they soon became very good at it. When the games finish, we ask the supervisors to email the results in to us at Schools Online Chess Club and the website gets updated. (If you coach multiple schools, you could go in and check results easily by looking at the account game history -- FMM.)

We have been running Schools Online Chess Club for less than a term and have over 50 schools and 250 kids registered who have played more than 1,200 games and earned over 7,000 stars in the last 30 days!

The kids love ChessKid, and the feedback from the schools has been tremendous. We hope with the support of ChessKid it will continue to grow!

Supply Checklist for School Chess Club

Items needed for a chess club:

Items needed for a tournament site

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