Scholastic tournament
A scholastic tournament is an event for school-age players, usually organized in sections by grade or age, with prizes for individual students and often for school teams as well.
Also called: scholastic chess
Scholastic events are the entry point for most young players. Entry is limited to students, and sections are set by grade or age, so a seven-year-old does not need to face a teenager in round one. Many events also keep a separate team prize, where a school or club adds the scores of its best players.
Formats are short Swiss events played on a single day or over a weekend, often with fast time controls so that rounds fit in a school timetable. Some are rated and some are not, so check the announcement before you register: a rated event counts toward a rating list, and an unrated one does not.
For parents, the practical points are the entry deadline, the room and the time of the first round, the rule on adult access to the playing hall, and the ratings or grades that define each section. For players, scholastic events build experience with notation, clocks and etiquette. See open tournament, swiss system and rating category.
Compare it with Sectional. A sectional is a tournament section limited to players inside a set rating range, so that each competitor mostly faces opponents of similar strength and prizes are fought for fairly.
How "Scholastic tournament" applies to your own results depends on where you stand now, and the improvement plans by rating band show what players near your rating work on.
Related terms
An open tournament accepts any entrant who meets the basic entry rules, whatever their rating or title, so that beginners and grandmasters can sit in the same section.
In a Swiss-system tournament the number of rounds is announced in advance, nobody is knocked out, and every round pairs players who have scored about the same so far, never matching the same two players twice.
A rating category is a band of ratings, often 200 points wide, that groups players of similar strength so they can be sectioned, paired, prized and described together in a tournament.
A team event is a competition in which players represent a side, individual games on several boards add up to a match result, and the team is ranked by the totals.
A time control is the rule that sets how much thinking time each player gets in a game, and whether extra time is added per move, which decides what kind of chess is being played.
Guides that go further
What a rating measures, how FIDE, Lichess, US Chess and chess.com compute theirs, and why the numbers differ.
How the Candidate Master, FIDE Master, International Master and Grandmaster titles are earned, with every Handbook clause.
The Handbook rules for a first FIDE rating: five rated games, the 1400 floor, the two 1800 draws and a worked example.
Want to spot this in your own games?
A first lesson starts with your games: George reviews them and builds a study plan around what he finds.