About Register4Chess


I started development on Reg4Chess.Com in 2014. While I was still a fairly inexperienced Local TD, I have over 30 years of experience as a software developer. I am the owner of a well-established web design company, Radioactive Frog Web Designs, Inc. that specializes in online database and shopping cart applications.


When I ran my first tournaments, I took all the registrations via "snail-mail" and hand-entered every single registration into WinTD. Did I mention how much I HATE data entry? Anyway, not only did I have to enter 30+ advanced registrations, I had to enter ANOTHER 30 AT THE DOOR, which meant I got a late start doing the pairings and the whole tournament went longer... When I asked people why they didn't register in advance, most of the responses were that they simply didn't plan ahead to send the registrations in a week early. Scholastic players especially can change their mind at the last minute due to all sorts of things, mood, homework, weather (raining, so let's play Chess instead of soccer!), etc.


Well, I thought, if I set up online registrations, I could solve BOTH of my problems: 1) let the users enter their OWN data and 2) allow them to register up until the day before the tournament. So for my SECOND tournament, I created a simple online registration form using PayPal and writing the data to a Microsoft Access database. I also wrote a simple query to export the registration data from Access into an Excel file so I could import it into WinTD. I allowed registrations up until MIDNIGHT, the night before the tournament, since exporting the data only took seconds and I knew I could do it the morning of the tournament. That morning, I only had THREE PLAYERS register at the door! About half the players had sent in checks, but the other half had registered online. Everyone was happy that I was able to get pairings up and start the first round ON TIME. ;-)


Since then, I have used online registration for several more tournaments, including the East Tennessee Regional Scholastic (Individual and Teams), and refined and improved the registration process a bit more each time. At my last tournament, over 90% of the players registered online! Not only that, several of the people who registered in the final few days said they would not have been able to come if they'd had to pay the increased "at the door" fee. This might also explain why my tournaments have been growing in size over time?


Subsequently I was contacted by fellow TDs about expanding my registration form into a full-fledged system, which allows any TD to set up a tournament, accept and edit player registrations, and finally, automatically export the player roster to a WinTD or SwissSys import file. Enter Reg4Chess.Com, a new online tournament registration service. I intend to eventually charge a nominal fee for this service, but it is currently FREE to try. If you have questions or suggestions, feel free to contact me.
-Jennifer Ogle