So You Want to Organize a FIDE Title Norm Tournament?

FIDE title norm tournaments are not something to be undertaken lightly. They require a great deal of planning and are time consumptive. We will discuss how to organize Round Robin title norm tournaments, even though you can have Swiss or Team events bear norms. I don’t recommend attempting Swiss title norm tournaments for various reasons such as low rated players and foreign player requirements. For the full technical requirements for title norm tournaments visit this link – http://www.fide.com/fide/handbook.html?id=58view=article

The first thing you will require is to secure an arbiter. Arbiters are the FIDE name for tournament directors. FIDE has two classifications of arbiters – FIDE Arbiter (FA) and International Arbiter (IA). The International Arbiter is the higher of the two. A norm tournament requires that the Chief Arbiter is either an FA or an IA. There is no wiggle room here – it has to be. You can search for FA’s or IA’s on the FIDE website – http://ratings.fide.com/advseek.phtml. You should work with the arbiter regarding the technical requirements for a norm tournament.

As with regular FIDE rated tournaments, a norm tournament must be registered with FIDE 30-days prior to the tournament otherwise there are financial penalties and FIDE can choose to not rate the event (thus disallowing any norms achieved). Only the national federation (USCF in our case) can register the event. So you will need to send to Walter Brown (This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.) the name of the event, the location, the dates, the number of rounds, the time control, the format (Round Robin or Swiss), and the name of the Chief Arbiter.

Some of the ‘easy’ technical requirements are time controls, total number of rounds, the number of rounds per day, and the maximum time spent playing in a single day. The minimum number of rounds for a norm tournament is 9 and this is the most common. Per FIDE regulations you can have no more than 2 rounds per day for a norm tournament. Most organizers will do 2 rounds per day because of time constraints. A 9 round event will take 4.5 days to complete.

There are also only 6 approved time controls for use, 3 of them with no delay or increment, and 3 with increment. I highly recommend utilizing a time control that uses increment either Game-90 + 30/sec increments or 40/90 SD/30 + 30/sec increments from move 1. With the 30-sec increment the players are required to continue taking notation even if they drop below 5 minutes. The final rule – the maximum time spent playing in a single day – is 12 hours. So your 1 or 2 rounds per day cannot total together more than 12 hours. With the two time controls I recommend you won’t have an issue with this final time based requirement.

The majority of the rest of the requirements will depend on the number of rounds. For simplicity sake I’m going to discuss everything based off of the event being 9 rounds. I’m going to also use the example that the event will provide possibilities to achieve a Grandmaster (GM) norm. There are other kinds such as IM, WGM, WIM norms, but that will add more complexity to the discussion. The ideas will be the same if you wanted to organize an IM norm tournament or a WGM norm tournament.

I made mention at the beginning of this article that Swiss events are more challenging which is why I focus on Round Robin events. This is true for the aforementioned reasons but also because the players always have to recalculate what score they would need for the norm based on their results so far and whether they will be able to meet all of the technical requirements. Additionally a Swiss event may allow unrated players to enter which causes havoc especially if a norm seeker runs into 2 unrated players (norms aren’t possible then). So we keep it simple – stick with the Round Robin, which is invitational in nature.

You will need a minimum of 3 participants with the GM title. You can have more if you wanted to, which can increase the Average Rating of Opponent (ARO) for the norm seekers, but you take away playing spots for norm seekers. Remember in a 9R-RR event you have 10 players, hence if 3 spots at a minimum are GM’s then 7 are GM-norm seekers.

6 of the 10 players needs to have some type of title – GM, IM, WGM, WIM, FM, WFM. Since 3 of these players already are the GM’s, you only need to have 3 of the other players to have the title. There is no exception here.

One of the difficult aspects is meeting the foreign federation requirement. Per the FIDE regulations you need 4 foreign players (using USA as the non-foreign example) from 2 different federations. You can solve this in a variety of combinations (2 foreign federations, 2 people each; or 4 foreign federations, 1 person from each; or a few other combinations). There is no exception here. My recommendation is to attempt to have the three top title holders to be from foreign federations. This way you’re only looking for 1 norm seeker that is a foreign player.

So you’ve addressed the major title holder (GM in this instance), the titled player requirement, and the foreign federation requirement. Now you have to calculate the required score. You have to do this based on each individual player and calculate their ARO. I recommend establishing a spreadsheet to do this so you don’t have to manually do it (and it reduces the risk of a mathematical error). You take all of a players opponents ratings, add them up, and then divide by 9 (remember we are using a 9 round event as the basis). You will want to round this number up or down based on the first decimal, so 2451.3 would be rounded down to 2451, while 2451.5 would be rounded up to 2452. After you have this number in hand you can go check the charts located here – http://www.fide.com/fide/handbook.html?id=58view=article in section 1.49a. Find the chart for a 9 round event, and use the GM column (since our example is GM norms), and then find the requisite score. Now you have the required score for a GM norm. Practically speaking while you can do 7/9 for a GM norm, it’s a tall task. Ideally it should be done at 6/9 for a GM norm with 6.5/9 as the highest you should attempt. We want it competitive but not highly improbable.

Now you’re able to go ahead and create the pairings. There are approved RR charts which you can find simply by Googling or use the pairing program (SwissSys is recommended). Some tournaments you see the drawing of lots done the day before the tournament. For most events the organizer, arbiter, and a non-involved third-party can perform the drawing of lots. Place all of the players in title order first and then in rating order within the title order. Now have the non-involved third-party draw numbers and assign them in the order of the players. At this point you can populate the pairing chart and email it out to the players (in PDF format).

So now we have addressed the design related issues to meet the technical requirements for holding a FIDE title norm tournament. A lot of work and the event has not even started! Let’s briefly discuss the execution of the event and what to do afterwards.

Any organizer looking to hold a FIDE title norm tournament, especially a round robin, should provide all of the equipment – boards, sets, clocks. Of course it’s my recommendation that any tournament organizer provide all of the equipment regardless of the type of event, but that’s a different story. It would be great to have some type of Internet-based relay of the moves using DGT electronic boards or MonRoi, however there are costs associated with this both in the acquisition of them and also taking the time to learn how to use them or hiring someone to use them. You could always manually relay games but that is a nightmare and I don’t recommend it. However you will have to keep a copy of all of the scoresheets so make sure you get them from the players. Some players may not wish to give them so you have to gently remind them that the scoresheets are the property of the organizer. You’ll want to make sure the scoresheets are legible as you have to transcribe them into PGN format also. So at a minimum provide boards, sets, and clocks. Anything more is great but this is the bare minimum.

After the event is done, you’re going to have to submit it for rating through the USCF TD/Affiliate area. Now understand that round robin events are treated differently for determining their FIDE rating fees. The FIDE rating fees for round robin tournaments is based on the Tournament Average Rating, which is adding up the rating of all players and dividing by the number of players (10 in this case). This is different from ARO because we’re now looking at EVERYONE. The FIDE rating fees are hefty for round robin events so be prepared and have them in your budget. For the current fees see this link http://www.fide.com/fide/handbook.html?id=3view=category in Section 12.2. Remember this is on top of USCF rating fees.

After the event has been submitted for rating to the USCF, you MUST send the SwissSys file (the one from the final round) to Walter Brown (This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.) so he can determine color allocations (FIDE requires this). Walter will submit to FIDE. Do this immediately! If you have already converted the scoresheets into PGN, send it also to Walter so he can upload that to the FIDE Rating Server. I also email copies of the PGN file to the players and all interested parties.

In a nutshell (a big one) these are the basics. I haven’t covered things like promoting the event, how to find players, management of issues during the event, etc. I’ll do these in future articles but for now this is sufficient. If you’re unsure about things and you have questions, feel free to email me at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. or stop by the North Shore Chess Center during a tournament to discuss. Make sure to ask questions – don’t assume or you may find yourself in a pickle and your tournament to not count for norms after all of the hard work you and the participants put in!

Sevan A. Muradian is the owner of the North Shore Chess Center where he runs FIDE rated tournaments and FIDE title norm tournaments along with regular USCF rated events and where the Chicago Blaze US Chess League team plays out of. For more information visit the chess center website athttp://www.nachess.org/nscc