The TRF format: inside a chess tournament report file

The format exists to carry a whole tournament in one text file: the parameters of the event, every player, and every game played. It is used in two scenarios.

• A report to the federation. The organizer exports the finished event and sends the file for rating calculation.
• Exchange with a pairing engine.The program hands the engine the current state of the tournament as TRF and receives the next round's pairings. That is exactly how bbpPairings works.

Hence two flavours of the file. For pairing, a minimum will do - player numbers, scores and round history. For a report you need a completed header and full details of every player: without a FIDE ID, a sex and a date of birth the report will not be accepted.

The current version is TRF-2026, while compatibility with the older TRF(bx) is retained.

The file opens with lines describing the tournament. Each begins with a three-digit code followed by a value.

The XXR and XXC lines are service lines for the pairing engine. Without XXC the engine does not know which colour player number one takes in round one, and refuses to pair.

The time control is written in the accepted form: 10'+5" means ten minutes per game with a five-second increment per move.

The body of the file is one 001 line per player. The important thing to grasp: fields are defined by character positions, not by spaces. One extra space shifts a column and the file parses wrongly.

Names go in Latin script: the format counts characters, and non-Latin alphabets in UTF-8 take two bytes per letter, which shifts the columns for anything reading the file byte by byte. A player's identity in the report is carried by the FIDE ID and the federation code rather than by the spelling of the name, so transliteration is not a problem.

After the main fields comes the game history - one block per round, holding the opponent's number, the colour and the result.

The result codes:

• 1 win, 0 loss, = draw;
• U a pairing-allocated bye with a full point;
• + and - wins and losses by forfeit: these count in the standings but are excluded from rating calculation.

An important detail: the result is recorded from the player's own point of view, not White's. If you are writing software this is the first place a bug appears - a game is reflected in two lines, and the codes on the two sides must mirror each other.

The second common mistake is a reference to a withdrawn player. If somebody has been removed from the event while the history still points at them, the engine trips. The correct treatment is to record that game as one played without an opponent: 0000 and a dash instead of a colour - withdrawals.

Some events do not score classically - three points for a win and one for a draw, for instance. The format has extensions for that: codes such as BBW, BBD and BBL set your own values for a win, a draw and a loss, with further codes for byes and forfeits - three-point scoring.

An ordinary tournament does not need them, but it is worth knowing they exist: meeting such a line in somebody else's file explains why the points do not add up the way you expect.

People assemble this file by hand only in exceptional cases: one wrong column and the report falls apart. Normally a tournament program exports it.

In the Vibe Chess app a finished tournament exports to TRF in one press: the header comes from the event parameters, the player data from their profiles, the round history from the games played. For the report to be complete, players fill in the federation-standards section of their profile: FIDE ID, national ID, title, sex, date of birth and federation.

The same format is used inside the app for pairing: before each round the state of the tournament goes to the bbpPairings engine, which returns the pairs. So the report is not «assembled at the end» - it lives alongside the tournament throughout.

• the number of rounds in XXR matches the number actually played;
• every player has a FIDE ID or a federation code, if the event is rated;
• names are in Latin script and fit inside the allotted positions;
• the score on each line agrees with the round history;
• there are no references to players absent from the file;
• results mirror correctly between the two opponents;
• the time control is written in the accepted form;
• the chief arbiter is named.

What else belongs in the paperwork - the playing conditions.