Limburg Open: an improved player experience

As much as we love making the lives of arbiters easier and better, at the end of the day we can’t lose sight of the fact that arbiters and organisers are all there to create better player experiences. Getting the first round started is one of the biggest challenges for organisers – and one of the biggest pain points for players.

We were excited to receive this tournament report from the Limburg Open where their biggest benefit of using Tornelo was being able to start the first round faster than normal! The ability to collaborate on a tournament is certainly one of the big advantages of using a cloud-based system.

Here’s their report:

The Limburg Open is a big international chess festival with more than 450 participants of all strengths from Grandmaster to newcomer and has been organized since 2009 in Maastricht in the Netherlands.

To manage such a big tournament divided over 5 sections requires quite a bit of logistical effort and efficiency from organizers.

Onboarding world record 32 minutes! 😀

Lot of players, due to long distance travel, arrive just half an hour before the actual start of the first round.

This is the hectic scene:

450 players have to find their way to the board
Officials are ready to make the ceremonial move on the first board
A talented player gets a last minute wild card to play in a higher section
The first round has to be paired according FIDE standards
Those with a bye should get half point correctly

Efficient check-in

The team developed a hybrid check-in procedure made possible thanks to the newly adopted Tornelo event management system to overcome this challenge
Simple solutions are often the best:

Arriving players mark their name on the board list are those not marked and are not paired.

6:40PM check-in closed!

All expected players were checked in Tornelo

Piece of cake with Tornelo to check absent players out:

Arbiter team has access to real time data

Before Tornelo, pairing for all sections (which is a lot of work) was done on one single PC managed by one arbiter, which created a bottleneck in the process.