2025 Pan-American Intercollegiate Championship - Summary

Arbiters always have one or two favorite events, for me PanAms is definitely one of them! 

It's the annual College Team Championship, with many familiar names from the titled players community, either there as players or as coaches. I simply love this community, and very happy any time I can be involved, and work an event for them.

This particular event is very hard, for multiple reasons: It involves intensive planning, and complex process during the event that requires attention to details and constant double and triple checks. It's super tiring with almost no breaks, but just like child-birth, when it's over, you can't wait for the next one .

I was super fortunate to do this event with my good friend and colleague, IA&NTD Glenn Panner. We shared almost all posts in this event, backroom chief, floor chief, floor arbiter and more. And of course we had a few other amazing arbiters on site and Peter, the main organizer of this year's event.

Girl power at its best: Mizzou-B against SLU-B

Let me list all the things that we did, as arbiters, to get ready and execute this event. All this will not have any of the organizer's responsibilities, which of course is quite substantial as well.

1) Register the event: The PanAms is a USCF and FIDE-rated event, so naturally we had to register the event with FIDE via the FIDE officer of the US Chess Federation. Interested what it entails? Read my previous blog.

2) Players rating: We of course constantly reviewing the incoming registrations, players and their ratings. A few players have weird situation where their FIDE or Canadian (CFC) rating is higher than the USCF, in that case we review their game history and possibly make a decision to use a conversion formula and convert their FIDE/CFC rating to USCF. 
Great example for this is GM Aryan Tari, who was on Mizzou's team coached by GM Cristian Chirila: His January 2025 FIDE rating is 2623, while his January 2025 USCF rating is 2489. In this case we used the conversion formula, and assigned a 2702 rating for him. This is much more representative of his level, as well as give the Mizzou team a much more accurate team average rating. Overall we had 21 players of out the 391 players who we assigned a modified/converted rating to, but of course much more that we reviewed. 

3) Board order: Every team can have up to 6 players, and teams have to define their board order before the event begins. Board order means what order they play in, relative to each other, which is especially important when they have more than 4 players. In this case if a player sits out, the others still have to be in the same order as defined in the board order at the beginning of the event.
For example: in a team with players 1-2-3-4-5, let's say first round player 5 not playing, so player 1-2-3-4 sits down in this order on board 1-2-3-4. But next round they can decide to give a rest to player 1, then player 2 needs to sit down on the top board, and the order will be player 2-3-4-5 on board 1-2-3-4, respectively. This is extremely important to pay attention to, for both coaches and for us, the arbiters. If a team sits down out of order, all players that are not sitting at the right board will be disqualified for that round.

If this is not complicated enough, here is another rule to keep in mind: If the players are within 50 rating points, the team have a chance to change the board order. For example: Webster's team has the following players in rating order, and since players 1-2 and Players 2-3-4 are within 50 points, the coach (GM Liem Le) and the team were free to mix player 1-2 up, or mix player 2-3-4 up. Check out their final board order:
1 GM YASSER PEREZ 2668  --> Board 2
2 GM LAZARO BATISTA 2637   --> Board 1
3  GM EMILIO CORDOVA 2614 --> Board 4
4 GM HARSHA BHARATHAKOTI 2608 --> Board 3
Interesting, right?
Even more fun when they have 5 players, like in the case of UTRGV: Players in rating order, and you can see that Players 2-3-4 are within 50 points, so the coach (GM Bartek Macieja) and the team were free to mix them up however they want to.
1 GM VIKTOR GAZIK 2665 --> Board 1
2 GM GLEB DUDIN 2614 --> Board 3
3 IM IRAKLI BERADZE 2577 --> Board 4
4 IM JURAJ DRUSKA 2570 --> Board 2
5 GM SHAWN RODRIGUE-LEMIEUX 2490 --> Board 5
The coaches have to submit this board order by a deadline, and then us, arbiters, have to make sure to have this board order throughout the whole event.
We had 25 teams out of the 91 teams who had more than 4 players on their roster, and we published their finalized board order before the event, which is essential when you prepare against a team!

4) Team Lineups for any given rounds are important information for teams that have more than 4 players. This is a required information to give by a deadline by the coach or team captain so that we know who will actually sit down at the boards. Obviously a 4-player team does not have to submit lineup, and If a 5- or 6-player team does not submit a lineup, they default back to the lineup they had the previous round. We, arbiters, always have to check if the lineup agrees with the board order. 

How does the whole tournament works?
1) We get the board order a few hours before Round 1. We/organizer publish that board order.
2) We pair the teams. At this point we only publish the "team pairings", so information on which team is playing with which team.
3) Teams have up to 1 hour before the round start to submit their lineup. After that deadline we input the specific lineup and then we can publish the board pairings that show which player is playing in the team, and so it'll show the player vs player pairings. This is the most anticipated information by the coaches, and they are always eager to get this as soon as possible. Of course this takes a bit of time on our end to input and generate board pairings.
This year first time ever, based on a player suggestions, we decided to publish the submitted (changed) lineups right after the deadline, without the specific board pairings. This was well received and got the heat off our backs! Great example that arbiters do listen to players feedback, and we do make things happen when they make sense and fair to everyone!!!
(The 60-minute deadline might be changed to 90 minutes for next years, as it's an extremely tight turnaround, especially if teams want more time to prepare against their opponents.) 
4) We print out the result slips that have the team players listed and distribute it on the tables.
5) Round starts, player play, games finish, and players must mark the results on the result slips. We also have to make sure that one of the players from each team signs the slip. Ideally it's the captain or top player, but realistically it's the last player to finish usually.
5) We collect the result slips, and rinse and repeat for 5 more times, totaling up to 6 rounds.

There are many other small or not so small additional details to this event, which I'll include in the next blog post! I'll also share some of the rulings and cases we had during the event. This will demonstrate that I would actually describe arbiter's work as 95% any work other than actual ruling for players. So I agree with Fabi on the number 95%, but used in a much different content.

Hope you enjoyed the read! To be continued soon!

The top matches were broadcasted - check out the games here.