The amateur version is less flamboyant and expensive instead relying on the player's own phones. One interesting aspect is there is great costs savings here. No rental of chess sets or chess clocks. You don't need many arbiters, one or two is enough to ensure rules are followed. You do not need pairing arbiters as systems from Chess.com, LiChess or PlayChess is used.
You can argue this is no different from playing at home on your bed against online opponent. The difference here is organisers feel safer to put money or trophies because anti-cheating is built in and one requirement is that you are face to face with your opponent.
You can structure it like a swiss tournament or you can follow the eSport route like this:
Breakdown of this steps:
The core concept
No boards, no clocks, no arbiters walking the aisles - well maybe at least one arbiter to walk around to see no engines are used. Every player brings a phone. The platform — Lichess, Chess.com, or PlayChess — becomes the arbiter, the clock, the board, the pairing system, and the anti-cheat engine simultaneously.
Online qualifier phase
Registration opens on the platform of choice. Players get assigned to a time-control bracket — bullet, blitz, or rapid — and the platform seeds them by their live ELO or rapid/blitz rating. Nobody needs to do anything manually. When a round starts, the server pairs players and pushes the game link directly to both phones. The players just tap "accept" and play.
Time control specifics matter a lot here:
Bullet (1+0 or 2+1) is the most spectator-friendly online but requires impeccable pre-move discipline on a phone screen — fat-finger errors become real tactical events. Blitz (3+2 or 5+0) is the sweet spot: fast enough to be exciting, slow enough for phone interfaces to be reliable. Rapid (10+0 or 15+10) is better suited to serious qualifiers or the later bracket stages where deliberate play matters more than speed.
Swiss rounds
Swiss is good here because it doesn't eliminate anyone early, maximises the number of games each player gets, and produces a clean ranked leaderboard at the end. Even weak players get to enjoy the rounds and not kicked out immediate.
Tiebreaks like Sonneborn–Berger (SB) or Buchholz score, both calculated automatically by the platform, resolve ties. No arbiter needed. The platform posts live standings between rounds.
Anti-cheat is non-trivial in a phone-based format. Chess.com's anti-cheat engine and Lichess's Irwin/Kaladin systems flag suspicious move correlation with engine lines in real time. And that would be more than enough. Supplementary rules — all games must be played at the venue for the knockout stage, phones must be visible on camera, no earbud use, etc.
Qualifying for the live stage
After Swiss rounds conclude, the top 8 or top 16 players — depending on the event scale — receive invitations to the live stage event ala esports!
Live knockout stage
With a nice big monitor and chairs for spectators to watch - way better than the typical thing that happens at any local tournament where a huge group of people crowd around one table suffocating the players.
The spectator experience:
- The evaluation bar swings dramatically during tactical complications - of course monitors placed facing the spectators but behind the players.
