What exactly is the SGM?
The oldest of the three Swiss team championships and the least known: 275 teams in five leagues, seven Saturdays a season. The top league plays eight boards a match, the bottom one four.
SGM stands for Schweizerische Gruppenmeisterschaft, the Swiss Group Championship. It is the oldest of the three Swiss team championships and the least known. In the 2026/27 season 275 teams are entered, 8 more than the year before. In March 2026 the federation wrote of "die 96-jährige SGM-Geschichte", which puts its start at about 1930.
Three championships, all three open to you
Every club player knows the SMM, the Swiss Team Championship: 349 teams in six leagues, March to October, mostly on Sunday. The SJMM is the youth championship, 117 teams over five Saturdays. The SGM sits between the two in the calendar, with seven Saturdays from November to March.
The SGM shares its regulations with the SMM and is run by the same tournament commission. It is still a championship of its own, with its own table and its own title.
You may play all three. The regulations count a player's appearances "pro Turnier (SMM und SGM)", that is per competition and separately. The dates do not collide: the SMM plays March to October and mostly on Sunday, the SGM November to March on Saturday.
The other three championships: What exactly is the SMM? · What exactly is the SJMM? · What exactly is the SJEM?
Five leagues, and fewer boards the further down
The 1. Bundesliga is the top: one zone, eight teams, eight boards. Its winner is Swiss group champion. Below it come two zones of the 2. Bundesliga, four of the 1. Regionalliga, eight of the 2. Regionalliga and 20 of the 3. Regionalliga, 35 zones in all.
How many boards a team has to fill depends on the league (Art. 7 para 2): eight in both Bundesliga tiers, six in the 1. Regionalliga, five in the 2. Regionalliga, four in the 3. Regionalliga. One board is one player, so a team in the 3. Regionalliga needs four people per match and a Bundesliga team needs eight. Plenty of small clubs cannot get eight together on a Saturday, but they can get four. That is what the lower leagues are for.
The 2. Regionalliga is the only league in Swiss team chess played over five boards. A match there is tied only when enough games are drawn.
Tap a tier, then a zone, to see the clubs.
Why they are called zones and not groups
The regulations do not call the SGM groups groups; they call them zones, because they are drawn geographically. A 3. Regionalliga zone holds clubs from the same area, so the trip to a match is about half an hour. The 1. Bundesliga is a single zone covering the whole country, and the trip there can take several hours.
The zones carry letters, A to B in the 2. Bundesliga, A to T in the 3. Regionalliga. They run from west to east.
Seven Saturdays from November to March
Every league plays on Saturday at 14:00. The time control is a long one: 40 moves in 90 minutes, then 30 minutes, plus 30 seconds a move from the first. The 2026/27 season runs over 7 rounds from 14 November 2026 to 6 March 2027.
Eight teams in a zone make seven rounds, a full round-robin, and then the season is over. Round 7 of the 1. Bundesliga is played centrally, all four matches in one hall.
The deciders and promotion matches follow: Deciders on 20 March 2027, First promotion matches on 10 April 2027, Second promotion matches on 24 April 2027.
The two Bundesliga tiers file a list of at most 20 players before the season, due a month before round one. The regional leagues have no such list.
Checked: not one of the 7 SGM Saturdays falls on a youth championship match day. Both play on Saturdays through the winter, and the dates still do not collide.
Scored like the SMM, relegated differently
Two match points for winning a match, one for a draw, none for a loss. Teams are ranked on match points, and board points settle a tie. That is exactly the SMM scoring.
Relegation is where the two differ. In the SMM the bottom two of every group go down, in the SGM only the last. Art. 35 para 1 states both in one sentence. Nobody is relegated out of the 3. Regionalliga.
The 2025/26 season shows how close that can be. Winterthur and Kirchberg finished the 1. Bundesliga level on nine match points, and half a board point settled second place.
The allocation is no longer a pyramid
A league system widens evenly downwards: twice as many zones per tier, and the promoted teams fit exactly. That sum no longer works for the SGM. Below the 8 zones of the 2. Regionalliga there are not 16 but 20 zones of the 3. Regionalliga.
The federation rebuilt the promotion round instead. The 20 zone winners play ten first promotion matches. The four winners of those with the weakest season record play a second. Four teams go up in the end.
Four record seasons in a row
The SGM has counted more teams than the season before in each of the last four seasons. The federation publishes those numbers every year. Four years ago it was 217 teams, now it is 275. Almost all of the growth lands in the 3. Regionalliga, which is why the bottom league has 20 zones and the one above it only eight.
One season is missing from the series. The SGM was not held in 2020/21.
Look up your own club
Many clubs enter teams in more than one championship. The lists for them are three separate documents, and all three are searched here.
The federation does not write club names consistently. The SMM has "Winterthur", the SJMM has "SG Winterthur". The search therefore matches word beginnings, and the three lists stand side by side instead of merged.
Where to watch
The central final round of the 1. Bundesliga is relayed on Lichess, with every board. That one round only. Tables for all the zones are on the federation’s own pages.
When the schedule appears
A season's schedule goes online early to mid-October, and the first round follows early to mid-November. The team lists in this post are the running 2026/27 season's. Unlike the youth championship, the allocation here is already published.
Sources
Every rule comes from the Swiss Chess Federation's SMM/SGM regulations and every figure from the official 2026/27 schedule. The team total is checked against the series the federation publishes itself. The results come from its own tournament reports.