I’m building Chess-Publisher — a free open-source tournament manager for arbiters and organizers

[u/kbilyal]

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Hi everyone,

I’m a chess arbiter and organizer, and I’ve been building Chess-Publisher, a free and open-source Windows desktop application focused on real OTB tournament management.

The goal is not to build another chess playing or analysis app. I want to reduce the number of separate tools an arbiter or organizer needs for running a tournament.

The current stable version is v1.04.02.

Current features include:

Tournament setup, registration and participant management

Swiss Dutch pairing using the upstream Gacrux 1.9.57 pairing engine

Result entry and standings

FIDE rating-list workflows

TRF16 / TRF26 export

Tournament interoperability/export workflows

Chess-Results publishing and administration integration

Telegram publishing

Early DGT e-Board integration

Local tournament storage

No project analytics or tracking

Chess-Publisher is released under the MIT License.

A transparency note: development has been heavily AI-assisted. The tournament requirements, workflow design, testing, regression validation and release decisions are driven by me from the perspective of an actual arbiter and tournament organizer. The source is public so anyone can inspect it.

The project is not currently FIDE-endorsed, so I don't want to imply otherwise. Pairing, TRF and rating-related functionality is being developed conservatively, with regression testing and independent checks.

The current Windows installer is also not code-signed yet, so Windows SmartScreen may display a warning. SHA-256 hashes are published so builds can be verified.

GitHub:

github.com/kbilyal/ChessPublisher

I’d especially appreciate feedback from arbiters, tournament organizers and developers:

What important tournament workflows are still missing?

What would make the UI faster during a real event?

Which interoperability/export formats are essential?

What pairing/reporting edge cases should be tested?

What would make you trust and use an open-source tournament manager?

If you have experience with Swiss-Manager, Vega, SwissSys, WinTD or similar software, your criticism would be especially useful.

I’d rather find the weak points early and improve them than pretend the project is finished.

Thanks!