2024-2025 Scholastics Regulations

The Scholastic Council and the Executive Board have approved the 2024-2025 Scholastic Regulations. This year’s regulations can be found here. Substantive changes in this year’s regulations include:

1. MAJOR CHANGE: At the K-12 Grade Nationals in December 2024 and the SuperNationals in May 2025, the “No-Show” or “Forfeit” time for late arrival in all sections has been reduced to 30 minutes. This is a change from previous years when the no-show/forfeit time was 60 minutes (Section 13.10).

2. Start times for each round in the K-12, K-8, and K-6 events at SuperNationals will be published separately in pre-tournament publicity (Section 10.10.1).

3. The sections in the Elementary School (K-6) National Championships held at the SuperNationals (Section 10.3.3) have been overhauled. All K-5 Under sections are replaced with new K-6 Under sections. In addition, the K-3 Unrated Section has been replaced with a single K-6 Unrated section intended primarily for players in grades 2 through 6. These changes sparked revisions to several other sections of the regulations. Section designations for K-1 players are unaffected.

4. For this year’s High School (K-12) National Championships at SuperNationals, the Blitz tournament will have two (2) sections: K-12 Championship and K-12 Under 1800. (See Section.10.3.1 and Appendix A.)

5. In Section 3.3.2 the procedures for Section Change Requests have been updated to address situations when a player is requesting to change sections after the cut-off time to pair Round 1.

6. The guidelines for scheduling national scholastic events (Section 2.1) have been revised to highlight times when US Chess should avoid scheduling a tournament.

7. Many parents require their children to wear “air tags.” US Chess supports this procedure and has updated the rules on electronic devices in Section 13.5 to reflect the use of this technology.

8. The rules in Appendix A governing the Blitz events held at the Grade Nationals and SuperNationals are changed to reflect the use of the time control Game/3, increment 2 (G/3 +2).

9. The rules for Bughouse in Appendix B are revised to address situations when one player on a Bughouse team touches their partner’s squares or pieces.

10. The site characteristics specified in Appendix G-1 for national scholastic events have been revised to help ensure better spacing between tables.