Who can enter?

The European Tantrix Championship is open to players of all standards who either live in Europe or who come from Europe. (*) While there are deadlines for matches to be completed, there are no fixed match times - you arrange a mutually convenient date and time for each match with your opponents.

(*) Choice of nationality is offered to those who live in a different country from the one on their passport in order to allow players to enter regional tournaments in a convenient time zone. However, to be fair to those who do not have this choice, you cannot keep changing - the selection you make now will define the regional and national tournaments you can enter and the country you can play for in world tournaments until you next change your usual country of residence. So, if you do live in a different country from the one on your passport, please think very carefully before choosing which country to play for and hence which regional or national tournaments to enter. Please do not enter a regional or national tournament unless you are willing to play most of your matches at convenient times for players in that region, which usually means evenings and weekends.

Tournament format:

The exact format is yet to be decided, but will be published before entries finally close. What we can say for now is that play will not start until late March at the earliest and should finish in early June at the latest. Also, there will be at least one group phase (c. 4 weeks) followed by a KO phase involving at least 32 players, as usual.

If the format remains the same as last year, there will be 16 groups of up to 10 players each in the main group phase in April, with the top four from each group qualifying for a 64-player KO phase in May. If it reverts to a similar format to that used in early years, there will be a short preliminary group phase in late March-early April, followed by a main group phase with 8 groups of 8-10 players each (with about half of the players qualifying for this phase automatically based on the pre-tournament seeding list and the rest qualifying through a short preliminary phase) and there will be 32 players in the KO phase in that case. There may be an optional consolation competition in the latter case too.

You will need to arrange and play about 2 matches per week on average during the group phases and they will consist of 3 games, so they will take an hour or more each. Knockout phase matches will be about twice as long (though they can of course be spread over more than one session), and round deadlines will be at approximately 5-day intervals. Please do not enter the Championship unless you intend to find the time to arrange and play all of your matches.

Rules:

The standard tournament rules apply eg. the time limit is 15 minutes per player per game and matches are scored using tournament points, which are mainly based on who wins and loses each game but also make some allowance for margins of victory.

Click here if you want to see the full rules or click here for just a summary of the main rules. The rules are also available in other languages as follows: French le règlement, German die Regeln and Hungarian, a bajnokságok általános szabályai.

Free Entry:

There is no entry fee but there are medals for the top three and the winner will be able to call themselves this year's European Tantrix Champion. In order to maintain the integrity of online tournaments, we do not seek to award big prizes in order to ensure that there is no incentive for anyone to try to play unfairly.

Elo ratings / Seeding method:

All games played will count towards the Tantrix Tournament Elo Ratings which are the main factor in deciding seedings for future tournaments. See the Elo seeding list page for details, but please note that you do NOT need to have an Elo rating in order to enter.

Final note:

The Overall Controller for this tournament and their contact details are shown near the bottom of the list of links just above these Notes for Entrants. If the Overall Controller is playing in the tournament, a player from elsewhere in the world will act as the independent non-playing controller in any situations where a conflict of interest might arise. In the case of disputes, the decisions of these controllers will be final. Assistant Controllers ("ACs"), who will be the first point of contact for players in specific sections of the draw, will be appointed after the draw.