Regulus is a free online Swiss tournament manager for chess. It runs in the web browser, pairs every round with the FIDE Dutch system, computes the 2026 FIDE tie-breaks and prints everything a chess arbiter needs, from the list of players to the board cards. No installation, no licence fee: open the page and start a tournament.
A Swiss-system pairing program for chess clubs and arbiters
In a Swiss tournament every player plays every round, against an opponent with a similar score, never the same opponent twice, with colours alternated as fairly as possible. Doing this by hand is slow and error-prone; Regulus does it in a second and checks the result against the FIDE rules:
- Automatic pairings with the FIDE Dutch system (the rules in force from 2026), including the pairing-allocated bye, absent players, requested byes, late entries and forbidden pairs (for example, relatives who must not meet).
- Manual pairings: the arbiter can swap players and colours or pair a whole round by hand; every change is checked against the absolute criteria (no rematches, no second bye, colour preferences).
- Tie-breaks: Buchholz Cut-1 and Buchholz, computed with the FIDE tie-break regulations (C.07) in force from 1 March 2026, including the new treatment of forfeits, byes and unplayed games.
- Results entered from the keyboard, forfeits, double forfeits and games not played by decision of the arbiter.
- Prizes by category (overall, age groups, women, rating bands, custom lists), not cumulative, with ties left to the arbiter.
- Printouts: pairings, standings after every round, crosstable, prizes, list of players and board cards, in Italian or English, with the club's logo.
Online chess tournament management
Without an account, a tournament is kept in the browser of the arbiter's device. With a free account it is saved online and can be:
- run by a group of arbiters together, from different computers;
- published for players and spectators: pairings, results and standings are visible as soon as the arbiter confirms them;
- shared privately, with a personal read-only link sent by e-mail.
Works with Vega and FIDE rating reports
Tournaments prepared with Vega can be imported from its TRF export (Vega 11) or from the .vegx archive (Vega 8). Every tournament can be exported in the FIDE Tournament Report File formats, TRF-16 and the new TRF-2026, for rating submission or for other pairing programs, and as a full JSON backup.
The pairing engine: bbpPairings
Pairings are computed by bbpPairings by Jeremy Bierema (Apache License 2.0), an open source pairing engine for the FIDE Dutch system. Regulus compiles it to WebAssembly, so the engine runs inside the browser, even offline, and exchanges data with Regulus in the FIDE TRF format. The tie-break calculations were checked on real club tournaments against a reference implementation, and every round is validated against the FIDE absolute criteria before it is published.
Regulus is independent software: it is not endorsed or approved by FIDE.
Get started
Open Regulus and create a tournament, or read the manual: creating a tournament, managing a tournament, importing and exporting.