Frequently asked questions.

ChessPD is a chess tournament Prize Distribution platform built for arbiters, organizers, and players. It replaces the macro-heavy Excel sheet most arbiters fight with, and turns the entire prize distribution into a guided five-step workflow that finishes within a minute of the last round's standings landing on your laptop.

ChessPD is built for the three people every tournament needs: the arbiter who runs the prize distribution, the organizer who pays the prizes, and the player who wants to see their result. Arbiters do the heavy lifting in the workspace; organizers see clean reports they can hand to sponsors; players open a public results page and find their slot in seconds.

No. ChessPD is built for chess arbiters who have never touched a database, written a formula, or read documentation. If you can run a tournament in Swiss Manager and open a spreadsheet, you can run ChessPD. Every screen is in plain English, the steps are numbered one to five, and the system tells you what to do next.

Within one minute of the last round's Swiss Manager standings landing on your laptop, your prize sheet is ready — winners assigned, reasons written, PDF and Excel exports waiting. Three of the five steps (tournament setup, prize configuration, and category filters) can be finished before the tournament starts or any time during the rounds, so when the last round ends, you are minutes away from publishing.

Step 1 — set up your tournament and events. Step 2 — build the prize configuration (categories, prizes, awards). Step 3 — define which players go into which category. Step 4 — upload the final Swiss Manager standings and generate winners. Step 5 — review, export, and publish. Steps 1, 2, and 3 can be done before or during the tournament; only Step 4 needs the final standings file.

Yes — and you should. Three of the five steps (tournament setup, prize configuration, and category filters) do not need the players' final scores, so you can finish them on day zero. When the last round ends, you only need to upload the standings file and click Generate. That is the difference between publishing in one minute versus losing your evening to spreadsheet formulas.

Yes. You export the final standings from Swiss Manager as a .xls or .xlsx file and upload it to ChessPD. The system reads the file automatically — it does not matter whether your file has the short eighteen-column layout or the extended forty-four-column layout, whether some birth years are blank, or whether half-points are written as ½ or 0.5. You do not have to clean the file or rename any columns.

Each category is defined by a simple rule: pick a column from the standings, pick a comparison (equals, contains, between, greater than, less than), and type the value. Example: "Rating between 1500 and 1800", or "Type equals U10", or "Club contains Mumbai". You can name your categories anything you like — Open, U-10, Best Female, Best Club Champion — and you can stack multiple rules in one category (all rules must match). A live preview shows you exactly how many players match before you generate anything.

No. You can build as many categories as your tournament needs — twenty, fifty, even more than a hundred — and ChessPD still generates the full prize sheet in under a minute. There is no hard cap and no slowdown; the system was built for federation-scale events where age-group, rating-band, and special-prize categories can easily reach three digits.

Yes. Any category can be marked as Manual, and you fill the winners yourself by searching for a player by name or rank. This is built for special prizes (Best Sportsmanship, Best Arbiter Choice, Best Junior) where the winner is a judgement call, not a rating calculation. Manual categories can be mixed freely with rule-driven categories in the same tournament.

Yes. Mark a category as Non-Player and ChessPD lets you type any team, school, or club name into each slot — no player lookup needed. This is for awards like Best Team, Best School, or Best District. The names you type appear on the printed sheet and on the public results page exactly as you entered them.

Yes. Go back to any step, make your change (rename a category, fix a filter, update a prize amount, add a manual winner), and ChessPD shows you a 'Stale' badge on the results so you know the printed sheet is no longer current. One click on Regenerate refreshes everything in seconds, and the new sheet has the corrected winners.

You decide upfront. ChessPD offers three settlement styles that the organizer or arbiter can switch any time: "Prefer the best position" (the strict reading — the better slot always wins), "Prefer the best position, except Main / Open" (the most common choice — Main / Open is honoured first, then position decides), and "Prefer the category order you set" (your drag-reorder priority is the final word). Whichever you pick, every winner's row carries a written one-line reason so nobody asks why.

By default no — ChessPD prevents one player from collecting two prizes in the same tournament. But you can mark specific categories as "Extra" (think Best Spirit, Sportsmanship, Brilliancy) and the same player is allowed to win those alongside their main category prize. It is one toggle per category, and the rule is shown next to every Extra category so nobody is confused.

ChessPD catches mistakes the moment you make them and shows a plain-English message. If your prize total does not match the prize fund, you see it the second you save. If a category has no matching players in the standings, you see it before you generate. If you typed a club name that does not exist in the file, the validation step flags it for you. Nothing silent ever ships into the printed sheet.

Yes. One tournament on ChessPD can host any number of events — Classical, Rapid, Blitz, U-7, U-13, FIDE-rated, AICF-rated — and each event has its own prize fund, its own categories, and its own standings file. The exports and the public page group everything together cleanly so sponsors see one tournament with several events, not several disconnected sheets.

ChessPD ships with the Indian Rupee plus twenty-five-plus other currencies including USD, EUR, GBP, JPY, AUD, CAD, SGD, and AED. Numbers are formatted the local way — Indian numbering (lakhs and crores) for rupees, Bangladeshi taka, Sri Lankan rupee and Nepali rupee; international comma grouping for everything else. Federations outside India can run their own tournaments on ChessPD without any custom build.

Three layouts, available as both PDF and Excel: Detailed Landscape (every column plus a written reason for each winner — best for record-keeping and dispute defence), Detailed Portrait (the same detail packed into A4 portrait — good for stapled handouts), and Compact (no reason column, everything on the fewest pages — best for quick public copies). Every layout carries your tournament details, the ChessPD logo, a QR code, a watermark, and a footer with the exact generation time.

Every winner on ChessPD has a one-line written explanation of why they won this prize and not another — which category they qualified for, which rule placed them there, and how any tie was settled. Arbiters point to it during disputes; players read it to understand a result; sponsors see a transparent record they can publish. Most prize sheets in chess do not have this; ChessPD makes it standard.

Yes. Every PDF and every Excel sheet carries the tournament name, date, venue, organizer, chief arbiter, and total prize fund at the top, the ChessPD logo and a QR code that scans to chesspd.com, and a footer showing the exact generation timestamp in IST. The sheet looks like a finished, official document the moment it leaves your laptop — no manual formatting required.

Yes. As soon as you publish a tournament, ChessPD creates a public page at chesspd.com/t/your-tournament-slug. Players, parents, sponsors, and federations can open it without signing in, search by player name, filter by category, and share the link. The page is mobile-first and lists each winner with the written reason next to their name.

No. Public results pages are open to anyone — no account, no login, no app install. A parent on a phone can search their child's name and see the prize within seconds. Players only need an account if they want a personal result history or future opt-in alerts for tournaments they follow.

Yes. ChessPD runs over HTTPS only, stores passwords with industry-standard hashing, signs every download link, rate-limits every login attempt to block brute-force, and uses verified Google Sign-In as the recommended primary login. Your tournament data stays private by default — only a tournament you explicitly publish becomes public — and your exports are not stored on shared drives or third-party services.

Yes. Everything you upload — tournament details, prize configurations, player standings, and the generated prize sheets — belongs to you. You can export PDF and Excel copies of every result at any time, and on request your account and all its data can be removed permanently. ChessPD is built on standard, portable formats so your data is never locked in a proprietary file you cannot read elsewhere.

Arbiter accounts are reviewed by a human before they can run a tournament — a one-time approval that usually takes well under an hour. The FIDE ID and mobile number help our admin team verify that you are a real chess arbiter, not a spam signup. Organizers and players do not need a FIDE ID and are active the moment they verify their email.

On ChessPD an organizer runs the tournament — venue, budget, sponsors, scheduling — and an arbiter runs the prize distribution. Today both roles share the same workflow, with organizer-specific tools (multi-tournament dashboards, sponsor-ready reports, team coordination) shipping in the next phase. The same person can be both an organizer and an arbiter on the same account.

Yes. Every PDF and Excel export carries your tournament name, organizer name, prize fund total, and final winner list in a layout sponsors expect to see. The public results page gives sponsors a shareable link they can post on social media or paste into a report deck. Sponsor-specific dashboards (player demographics, federation distribution, prize spread) are on the roadmap for organizers handling multi-event circuits.

Open chesspd.com, type your name or the tournament name into the search bar, and the public results pages for any tournament you played in show up. No account, no login. Each result tells you your slot, your category, your prize, and the one-line reason for the result. If a tournament you played in is not on ChessPD yet, tell the arbiter — they can publish the results free.

Today, public results pages on ChessPD let you search every tournament that has been published. A personal result history page (one place that lists every prize you have ever won across ChessPD tournaments) and result alerts when new tournaments publish are next on the roadmap. The public search already works for anyone — no sign-up needed.