Three minutes, from nothing to round one

Create the tournamentOne tap for a ready-made preset, or set the system, time control, number of rounds and player cap yourself.
Get your players inShare the invite link, or — for an over-the-board event — type their names at the registration desk. Players do not need an account.
Draw the pairings, then printKaturanga pairs everyone and numbers the boards; the pairing sheet downloads as a print-ready PDF.

Scores, Buchholz, registration numbers and the next round's pairings are Katuranga's job. The organiser only taps in each board's result.

Create a tournament Get the Android app

Two ways to play: Online or Over the board

The choice sits in a single field called Play mode, and it is the only thing that separates an online club event from a district tournament on wooden boards.

	Online	Offline
The board	A Katuranga board, in the browser or the app.	A real board in the room. Katuranga opens no board at all.
Results	Recorded by themselves as each game ends.	Entered by the organiser from the desk.
Players	Have a Katuranga account.	No account needed — a name is enough.
The clock	A digital clock on screen, per the time control.	The chess clock on the table, the organiser's own.

The custom tournament form: Swiss system selected, Play mode set to Offline, time control, start time, number of rounds and player cap — The **Set it up yourself** form. The system comes first — it decides how players are paired — then **Play mode**: Online or Offline.

Step 1 — Create the tournament

Open Tournaments. If you would rather not think about settings at all, take one of the presets: the name, start time and everything else are filled in, and you are entered as the first player.

The Create now card with three presets: Blitz Swiss, Blitz Arena and Small Table — Three one-tap presets. The green line above them tells you how many tournaments you have left this year.

Four systems are available under Set it up yourself:

Swiss	A fixed number of rounds, everybody keeps playing, opponents are drawn from those on the same score. The most common tournament system in chess.
Knockout	Lose once and you are out. The bracket is drawn all the way to the champion's column.
Round-robin	Everyone meets everyone. The fairest format for a small field.
Arena	Keep playing for as long as the clock runs; winning streaks score double.

Step 2 — Get your players in

Online: one invite link

Copy it and send it to the club group. Anyone may open it — those who want to join simply sign in.

The invite link box with a Copy button — The invite link. The organiser can also add people directly by username.

The list of entrants with each player's Elo — The entrant list. The organiser can remove or disqualify a player — neither erases results already recorded.

Over the board: players without an account

In the room, people turn up with an entry fee — not an account. So an Offline tournament gets a box of its own: type the name, add an Elo if there is one (it may be left empty), press Add. That is all.

The walk-in players box: name field, Elo field, Add button, download template and upload template buttons — Walk-in players appear for offline tournaments only.

If the names are already written down in the registration book, there is no need to type them one by one: download the template, fill it in with any spreadsheet app, and upload it. It is as simple as this:

# Walk-in players — Cibinong District Inter-Neighbourhood Chess Tournament
# One player per line. Elo may be left empty.
# Delete the three example rows below before uploading.
Name,Elo
Budi Santoso,1450
Siti Rahmawati,1320
Ahmad Fauzi,

A line that fails does not cancel the ones that worked — skipped lines come back with the reason, so one blank row in the middle of a file does not send the desk back to the start. Duplicate names are refused on purpose: two "Budi" on one pairing sheet cannot be told apart when a board is called.

Step 3 — Draw the pairings

One button. Katuranga pairs every entrant according to the chosen system, allocates colours, gives a bye to whoever is left without an opponent, and numbers the boards from 1.

The pairing table: Board, No., White, Elo, Points, Result, Points, Black, Elo, No. — The table deliberately looks like the pairing sheets chess players already read on a notice board: board number first, then the player's registration number.

Board number — what the organiser calls out. A bye gets no number: there is no board to walk to.
Registration number — the order in which someone signed up, the same number that is in the organiser's registration book.
Absent (walkover) — mark whoever did not turn up. Their opponent wins without playing, the points they already earned stay in the standings, and they are left out of the next round's pairings.
Play now — online tournaments only: the button that opens your own game.

The same pairing table on a phone screen — The same table on a phone — and that is the screen the organiser actually holds in the room. It is in the Android app too.

Step 4 — Download the pairing sheet (PDF)

Once the pairings are drawn, the organiser — and only the organiser — gets a download button. One page, ready to print, ready for the wall.

The pairing sheet section with the Download this round's PDF button — The button lives in the organiser panel, under the Pairings section.

The pairing sheet PDF: tournament title, round 1 pairings with empty result boxes, standings, and a space for the organiser's signature — The first page of a pairing sheet — a real example, not an illustration.

It carries what the desk needs in the room:

Tournament name, system, time control, and which round this is.
Every board's pairing with the registration numbers and both players' scores before the game.
Result boxes left deliberately empty — that is where results are written by hand before they are entered.
The current standings underneath, and a space for the organiser's signature.

Download the example PDF

The example was produced by the same server that will produce your own sheet later.

Step 5 — Enter the results; the standings follow

Each board's result is tapped straight into its row: 1–0, ½–½ or 0–1. When the round is done, draw the pairings again for the next one.

The standings table: rank, registration number, name, points, win/draw/loss and Buchholz — The standings are recalculated every time a result goes in.

Tie-break — on equal points, the smaller registration number stands higher. Chosen because it can be explained to a player standing in front of the notice board.
Buchholz is still calculated and still shown as an information column for Swiss events.
Disqualification differs from a walkover: a disqualified player loses their placing, a player marked absent does not.

How many tournaments you may create

Joining a tournament is always free. What is limited is creating one:

Standard (free)	1 tournament per year
Premium	3 tournaments per year
Pro	5 tournaments per year

Yearly subscriptions get ten times the allowance, and an unused allowance does not expire. The number of entrants is not capped by the plan — a single tournament may hold hundreds of players. See Pricing.

Running a club, a school or a district event that needs more? Write to support@katuranga.com — tell us about it and we will sort it out.

Create a tournament Contact us