On my way to the 2025 PanAms - Notes on how an event gets rated by FIDE

Hi Everyone,

My name is Judit Sztaray, living in California. I'm a National Tournament Director (US Chess rank), and an International Arbiter (FIDE rank, just received my Category C).

I have decided to document my journey as chess arbiter and make posts about chess events and news from the arbiter’s point of view, as well as share updates on events I’m working at.

Last few days have been controversial to say the least, but not here to rehash that.

Today’s interesting news was that the world championship games were not rated for the January 2025 fide rating list.

what does this mean? As an arbiter I suspect there was a break in the usual process… and don’t know if we will ever know where it was.

but it’s a good excuse to tell you how an event gets rated, what we - arbiters - have to do to make it happen, so that players can have games counted towards their rating are you still with me?

I’m en route to Charlotte, about to take off in Sacramento, so will write the rest of this blog in the plane! So make sure to check back because more to come soon!

and look for updates from the 2025 Pan American Intercollegiate Championship, where I’ll be the deputy chief next to Glenn Panner CA.

And now landed, and so here is the rest of the blog:

Not sure how many of the players know what it takes for an event to be FIDE-rated. Let me just say, that arbiters and organizers work hard on that to make it happen. There are three stages to this:

1. Register the event with FIDE:
Most of us, running normal FIDE-rated events, have to reach out to the national chess federation and its FIDE manager/officer to get the event registered. Yours truly is running events usually in the USA, so the amazing Brian Yang is our FIDE officer. But if you happen to run event in another country, you can easily look this up either on the chess federation's website, or in the Federation directory on FIDE's website. This is what I used when running events in Canada, Mexico and the Dominican Republic!
Every chess federation has different guidelines on what is the deadline you have to keep to register your event, which is usually a few days before the deadline FIDE has for the officers. US Chess Federation has a page published with these guidelines. Deadlines are different for normal and norm tournaments, of course, so don't leave this to the last minute!
Also, if you have a unique format, or one of the formats that need the approval from the FIDE Qualification Committee, that takes extra time, so keep that in mind as well! 
When registering the event, the organizer or chief arbiter need to list several key information in the email:
Event name, date, location, format (type, round #, time control), norm possible, schedule, expected number of players, Chief Arbiter, and Chief Organizer. All these go to the tournament's FIDE page. 
Once this is done, 

2. Run the event with a FIDE-approved pairing software
This is no big deal of course, but something that the arbiters have to keep in mind. 
For example: in the US, arbiters use two types of softwares usually: Swisssys or WinTD. First one is FIDE-approved, while the later is not. However, WinTD happens to be so much better for Team tournaments, so in the upcoming PanAms, we'll use both WintTD, and replicate the tournament in Swisssys too, so that we have an easy time submitting the event for FIDE-rating.

3. Submit the event for rating
After the event completed, Chief Arbiter, or their designated assistant, needs to submit the event for rating. This is done by sending the file to the FIDE officer of the national federation. Before doing that, it's nice to make sure that the file is all correct, and updated, and so the FIDE officer doesn't have to make too many corrections/updates before uploading the event.

You can always track the process on FIDE's website:
https://ratings.fide.com/rated_tournaments.phtml?country=all
see if they have published your event, and if they have received the rating report. 

Of course, as I've learnt yesterday, official FIDE events have a slightly different way to do this: they don't have to go through the national federation, but they can directly register their event with FIDE.

I'm sure I'm forgetting a lot of things, given it's 6am here in the East Coast of the US, having slept very little on the plane, but will come back and update it if I think of something important!

Hope you enjoyed my first blog. Cheers everyone!