TRF25 Final Draft 

The page at https://tec.fide.com/2024/09/04/draft-trf-2025-extensions-for-team-pairing-and-tie-breaks/ already tells much of the story. This is an update of what has been done in the months since the first draft was published.

There have been meetings in person and online, and months of discussion, mainly among TEC members, but also from outsiders who have contributed with interesting questions and suggestions.

The output is this second draft, which should be the final one. “Should” means that some changes could still be made but just to improve the language (which won’t change the specification) or, most importantly, to correct some macroscopic errors that might have arisen from the well-known phenomenon called “insider blindness”.

The changes from the first draft are in red (remember: blue is for the current TRF16 specification, black is for the extension already presented in the first TRF25 draft). Of course, in the official final version, the only colour will be black.

There are many new features in this draft. The main ones are already mentioned in the title, i.e. recommendations for National Rating Support (NRS) and In-Tournament Data Exchange (ITDX), to improve the exchange of information between Tournament Handler Programs (THPs) themselves, and between THPs and external pairing engines, whose authors will be invited to support this new TRF25 specification, instead of relying on their own custom extensions.

NRS records are special records that resemble the 001 record structure and store national information, starting with the rating federation code in place of “001”. The TEC Commission has decided to define them and recommend their use, but their encoding/decoding will always be a THP choice. These records are the only official ones that can start with a three-letter code. And to avoid confusion with the so-called “comment” records (often modelling schemes for the records that follow), this latter type of record (for the THPs that use them) will have to be introduced by ### (triple pound).

Besides these NRS records, several others have been introduced to support IDTX: the total number of rounds (142), the initial colour (152), the scoring point systems (162 for individuals, 362 for teams), the starting rank method (172, to be used when national records are present), the coded tournament type (192 – in the previous draft it was 092, but it was decided not to lose back compatibility with TRF06/TRF16), the prohibited pairings (260) and the absent participants for future rounds (240 – an evolution of the previous 330 record, which was used only for teams). Other records have been introduced to support precise requests (such as 222 -encoded type control-, very similar to what is currently used in PGN files). Quite a number of changes have also been made to the position and/or length of various fields (e.g. to allow match points to be expressed with fractional points). Some explanations have been extended to clarify parts that were probably forgotten in the first draft (e.g. see the custom tie-breaks or the PTS “tie-break” to be used with the 212 record).

Like last time, the new TRF25 draft is accompanied by two annexes, the Mandatory Tie-Breaks document (changes in red) and the 192 Tournament Type Code Table, 092 in the first draft, with actually less entries than the first version. A third annex is a sample TRF, which can be used to verify the correctness of an implementation or the flaws of the example itself!

Annex-1: Tournament Type Code Table (TRF code 192)
Annex-2: Mandatory Tie-Breaks
Annex-3: TRF25 sample