I built a Python tool for scraping tournament data from chess-results.com

[mleonard]

I wrote a small Python tool that hands you a tournament's data in a form you can work with: standings, or a full per-player history — who each player met, what colour, whether they floated or took a bye — as a command-line report, a printable pairing sheet, or JSON.

Code: Select all

pip install chess-results

$ chess-results standings 1452107 --after 6
2026 British Chess Championships: Championship — after round 6
   1    5    2  GM  Adams, Michael
   2    5    3  GM  Royal, Shreyas
   3    5    4  IM  Grieve, Harry
   4    5    6  IM  Bazakutsa, Svyatoslav
   5   4½    7  IM  Harvey, Marcus R
   6   4½    9  IM  Czopor, Maciej

Swiss Manager uploads results to https://chess-results.com after every round — so if the laptop running it dies mid-event and nobody can lay hands on the licence, this tool can pick that data back up, hand it to a free pairing program, and produce the next round without it. I've tested that path with https://github.com/BieremaBoyzProgramming/bbpPairings (free to download), but anything similar should work.

A few honest caveats if you're leaning on it that way:

• You need internet at the venue.
• Standard Swiss only — no round robins or the more exotic formats.
• It can only work from the last round Swiss Manager managed to upload. If the laptop died before those results went up, that round's gone with it.
• Treat the output as a fair, legal pairing — not necessarily the exact one Swiss Manager would have made.

It's gentle on chess-results.com, however you use it: one second between requests, an identifying user-agent, and aggressive caching.

Code and docs: https://github.com/markjonleonard/chess-results

Questions and real-event bug reports very welcome — especially if your tournament's page doesn't match the layouts I've tested against.

[Roger de Coverly]

Swiss Manager uploads results to https://chess-results.com after every round — so if the laptop running it dies mid-event and nobody can lay hands on the licence, this tool can pick that data back up, hand it to a free pairing program, and produce the next round without it.

I think these days arbiters attend tournaments in packs, so multiple laptops are usually available. Swiss Manager has a feature that provided the results have been uploaded to the chess-results server and that is still running, any arbiter, anywhere can download the tournament data and both check the pairings for previous rounds and produce the next round.

I don't think Swiss Manager is very fault tolerant. Once a pairing has been "published" it can be had work to change it if an error is discovered in the results for previous rounds.

[mleonard]

That's a fair point about arbiters usually travelling in packs -- certainly true at Frome Congress!
It's good to know that Swiss Manager can pull the tournament back down from chess-results itself if another copy is running.

My own angle on this is a bit different, though: I use a Mac, and Swiss Manager is Windows-only, so I don't run a copy of my own at all. I have to borrow someone else's machine.
This tool and a free cross-platform pairing engine is what lets me get from chess-results.com to a printable pairing sheet without needing a Windows machine of my own.

[Paul McKeown]

I use a Mac, and Swiss Manager is Windows-only

Swiss Manager works perfectly well on Linux with Wine translation, in our experience at Richmond Juniors. I think you ought to be able to do something similar on Mac OS.

[mleonard]

That's good to know, but my Mac is owned by my company and I'm not allowed to install Wine. I'd like to try it but some software installs are restricted.