Understanding Event Results

This guide is designed to help you better understand chess event results. We will cover individual standings, team standings, tie-breaks and special awards such as the biggest gainer and biggest upset awards. This guide is specific to Chess Power events, however you can apply the same concepts to all chess events.

Finding your event

The first step is to find the event you are interested. You can find all Chess Power event results on our event results page in Tornelo.

You can type in a keyword in the search box to find the event you are looking for. If you do not sign in to Tornelo, you will only see events that have been marked as Public. If you sign in to Tornelo, you will also see Community events. Since 2024 onwards, all Chess Power events are marked as Community events.

We will run through an example. In this case we are looking for the most recent Taupo Regionals event that was held on 30 May 2024. Firstly, I sign in to Tornelo. I then type Taupo in the search box.

You can search for anything you like, including the event name or location.

I can see my event at the top of the list, so I click it.

I click Standings on the left menu to see results.

Some events have multiple sections. In this particular event, I can see there are four sections, Junior, Intermediate, Rookie and Senior.

SECTIONS

For regional events, Rookies are restricted to beginners year 6 or below. Juniors are years 1 to 6. Intermediates are years 7-8. And Seniors are years 9+. 

Different events will have different sections. Some events only have a single section. In that case, you will not be able to change the section.

You can change the section by clicking the section you want or clicking the arrow to the left to go to the previous section, or to the right to go to the next section.

INDIVIDUAL AND TEAM RESULTS

If an event is a team event, you will notice a Players | Teams toggle button on the top right. If the event is not a team event, this toggle will not appear. The default view for team events standings is Players, which means individual results. To see Team results, click the Teams button.

i am interested in the Intermediate section individual and team results. I click the Intermediate section, and leave the Players | Teams toggle set to Players to view the individual results.

STANDINGS COLUMNS

Let's explain each of the columns.

Rank describes the placing of each individual player. 

Team is the team that player was part of. A player can only be a member of one and only one team. A school can enter many teams if they wish.

Score is the total number of points that player has scored in this event. A player receives 1 point for a win, 1/2 a point for a draw and 0 points for a loss. 

BH is a tie-break. BH stands for Bucholz. Tie-breaks are used to determine who wins when the score is the same. We actually use 7 different tie-breaks for individual events. Remember, we only use a tie-break if the scores are tied. Then we use the first tie-break. If the first tie-break is tied, then we use the second tie-break and so on. In practice, it is extremely rare that we need to use more than one tie-break. You can read about all the tie-breaks we could potentially use and in what order on our regionals prize page.

Rtg means Rating. Every chess player on the planet has a chess rating. A rating is an estimate of a players current skill level. It is maintained from the first event through to their last. FIDE is the international body of chess and FIDE maintain the international rating system. You can search for any player in the world using the FIDE ratings search. To obtain a FIDE rating, you have to play in the FIDE rated event. Typically this has players from multiple countries. 

Most New Zealand chess events are NZCF rated. NZCF is the national body for chess. You can search for NZCF ratings too on the NZCF ratings page. Some Chess Power events are NZCF-rated.

For Chess Power events, we use Tornelo ratings. Tornelo ratings tend to be more current than other rating systems because every event is rated immediately after the tournament finishes. You can find any player that has participated in a Chess Power event and their rating on the Chess Power players search page.

A rating takes time to be established. Players must have an established rating for their rating to show up in the rating column. An established rating is also required to show if their rating has gone up or down, and to be in a position to be awarded a biggest upset prize. An established rating is achieved by playing 20 rated games prior to the tournament.

+/- is how much a players rating is expected to go up or down following this event.

Gender is self explanatory. At Chess Power we try and encourage more girls to play chess, so we have special awards to recognise achievement by girls. 

Ups refers to upset. If this player beat someone rated higher than them this column displays how many rating points the other player was, higher than them. The bigger the number, the bigger the upset. If this player didn't beat anyone rated higher than them, the Ups column will be blank for that player. Both players must have an established rating for an upset to show in this column.

SPECIAL FEATURES

There are a bunch of special features Tornelo offers, using various buttons on the interface. You can choose which columns to show or remove, sort any column, filter results, download and print results. Click around and see what each button does to find out more.

INTERPRETING INDIVIDUAL RESULTS

Now we understand the meaning of each column, we can start to understand the individual results.

Eric Yang came clear first on 6 1/2 points. You might say the tie-break for Eric and Hunter are the same, but remember the tie-break is only relevent if two or more scores are the same.

Hunter Russell came 2nd on 6 points.

Claire Delos Santos came 3rd on 5 1/2 points. Claire was also the best girl. Lazeilia Fitell in 14th place was the 2nd best girl.

Eric Yang was the biggest gainer, gaining 100 rating points.

Remi Vade achieved the biggest upset, beating an opponent rated 315 points above him. To find out who Remi actually beat, we have to look at Remi's individual results in this event.

To do this, I click Remi's name, then click the View Profile button.

At the bottom of Remi's profile, I can see all the games he played in this event, and the results of each game.

I can see Remi has two wins : Against Claire in round 1, and against Lazeilia in round 4. However Lazeilia did not have a rating. Players that are new to Chess Power events don't have a rating. Therefore, Remi's biggest upset was due to him beating Claire in Round 1.

Let's move on to the Team Results. Click Standings, then click the Teams toggle button. I change the Section to Intermediates.

I can see there were three teams in this event. 

The Score column for Teams is a Team score. It is calculated by summing to the top four players scores' together. 

The TT column is a Team tie-break. The team tie-break uses a mathematical logarithmic formula to calculate the performance of each team.

The John Paul College team came first on 23 team points.

Mokoia Eastern Knights came second of 14 team points.

And Mokoia Intermediates came third on 6 1/2 team points.

The team tie-break is not needed as no team got the same score. In practice it is quite rare for two teams to get the same team score.

To see how the John Paul College team got 23 points, click the > expander.

Remember, the top 4 scores are summed to calculate the team score. To make it easier, I will sort the players in descending score order. I do this by clicking the Score column at the very top, then click Sort descending. I now get this.

Now that is a lot better. To calculate the team score, I simply add the top four players scores together. Eric = 6.5 + Hunter = 6 + Claire = 5.5 + Marthinus = 5. That gives a total of 23.

QUALIFICATION

Some events give you qualification spots to other events. For example, for Chess Power regional team events, the top three individual players gain entry to the Champions Trophy. And the top teams gain entry into the Team National Finals. It is best to read the details for the specific event to learn how to qualify for other events. All Chess Power events are on our events calendar.

SUMMARY

Well done! You have now learned how to interpret Chess Power event results in Tornelo. If you haven't already, it is time for you to start discovering finished events and results for yourself!