Information for our online tournaments

Using lichess

IAC online tournaments are held on lichess. Please set up an account on https://lichess.org/ if your child does not already have one. To do so, visit https://lichess.org/signup

Once you have an account created, you have the option to enable "Kid Mode" which will disable any communication from opponents to your children. To set up Kid Mode, go to https://lichess.org/account/kid after setting up the account. It will ask you to create a password so that your child will not be able to enable chat or messaging on their own.

Lastly, you will need to join the IAC team, which you can do by visiting https://lichess.org/team/international-academy-of-chess

We recommend that players participate in our lichess events on a computer, but if you are on a mobile device you can still play. Just make sure you are logged in to lichess.org through a web browser (Chrome, Safari, etc) and then click the team link above to join the IAC team.

If this doesn't work, you can also navigate to the IAC team page by hovering over the 'Community' tab (again, this only appears if you are in the web browser version, NOT in the app) and clicking on 'Teams.' Then click on 'All teams,' which should display on the left side menu. This will allow you to search. Type 'Hosting Scholastic' into the search bar and the first result displayed at the top should be 'International Academy of Chess.' Clicking on that will navigate you to the team page where you can join the team (there's a large green 'join' button) and then find our upcoming events displayed under 'tournaments.' If you still have trouble finding our team page, please feel free to email us at td@ia-chess.com.

Online Formats

The online tournaments in the IAC Summer Series and Badger Chess Challenge Series will be Arena tournaments, rather than Swiss. The difference is that with a Swiss (the system that weekend tournaments use), players are paired and then the next round cannot begin until the current round has finished completely. This means that the players of the first game that finishes have to wait until the last game finishes before they can play again. Sometimes this leads to children sitting around and getting restless. With Arena pairings, the first round is paired by rating, then as soon as a game finishes the system will look to pair the players waiting for games with others close to their same score as quickly as it can manage.

This means that during a two hour online arena event your child may wind up playing several games more than they would at a weekend tournament at a school. Arena events do not have any impact on US Chess ratings and do not require US Chess memberships to play.

We also organize online Swiss events, such as the Scholastic Fall Extravaganza. These events are run with multiple sections and a fixed number of rounds. Every round after the first round is set to begin a fixed amount of time after the completion of all games from the previous round. Lichess Rapid Ratings are used for pairings. In rounds after the initial round, players are paired with opponents who have a similar score in the tournament. Players are not allowed to play the same person more than once in a Swiss. Some Swiss events impact a player's US Chess Online Quick Rating. Please see specific events for more information on which sections are rated.

Time Control

The time control will be 10+5. This means that each player starts out with 10 minutes on their clocks and gets five seconds added to their time each time they make a move. So a player who makes a move with 8:40 remaining on their clock would then have 8:45 remaining.