Submit Tournament Results to US Chess

For those unfortunate souls who need to deal with the US Chess rating submission process, we've attempted to provide a little relief with this help article.

To get started you will want to navigate to:

https://new.uschess.org/

About halfway down the page is the My Authorized Affiliates section. Find and select the affiliate for which you are submitting a tournament (we will release an article detailing the affiliate setup process soon).

Now find the Tournament Rating Report link in the righthand menu:

At this point, you will arrive at the intimidating screen below. If you are using a modern chess pairing software such as Chess Nut, getting past this step will be relatively straightforward. If you are submitting manually, the process is an arduous one for another article.

The first step here is to add a "File Name." I like to use the name of the tournament plus a date indication e.g. Kickoff Swiss, Jan '24.

Next you will need to upload the required dbf files. If you are using Chess Nut, these can be obtained after clicking the Generate Tournament Files button on your event page:

(note the checklist which will prevent some painful rework)

The download includes the 3 dbf files named exactly as shown on the US Chess form above and a Readme.txt file with some helpful meta data to get you through the remainder of the form.

Though the Header file has information about the Chief TD and Time Control, you are required to enter that person's USCF ID once more on the submission form. Chess Nut provides this information in the readme for quick copy pasting. Usually, this is all that is needed except for in rare circumstances such as an online event. You will now click Upload Tournament Data.

At this point, you will find yourself at a screen that looks like this:

It is useful to note the Event ID (in Chess Nut, you may copy this into the event information so your club members are able to link directly to the ratings page on the USCF website). 

Next you should Return to Upload/Enter/Edit Rating Report Files

Every upload will necessarily have at least one warning which must be manually handled since the TLA Reference field can't be submitted through the dbf files. You will want to carefully review the form below as it is your responsibility to ensure the information is accurate when submitting to US Chess. When you are ready, click Save

Once you save the changes and resolve your warnings and/or errors, you should re-Validate your event:

If everything is in order, you will be able to Release Event for Submission. You may notice that there are some alerts in the screenshot below. Not all alerts can be resolved and they do not stop you from releasing the event. 

I'll assume you are probably not inclined to donate money to US Chess after grappling with the software to this point; however, for the special person feeling generous at this moment, you may donate at this step. Either way, you will need to click Compute Total Due to continue.

This adds fields to the screen including an easy to miss checkbox. Ensure you check off that acknowledgement and Release Event for Submission again (of course filling in the prize information should it be relevant to your situation)

Now we get to re-compute the total:

And we move on to (almost) pay for the event:

Now we arrive at this state-of-the-art payment page (I'd recommend using a virtual credit card for this vendor):

And that's it! Unless you experienced some edge case issues. If there is anything else you'd like us to outline in this process, please reach out to hello@chessnut.club and we'll update this such that it is a living document.