What exactly is the SJEM?
The Swiss youth individual championship is the only one of the four national championships in which nobody plays for a team: five categories, four qualifying weekends, and a points table that fills the final.
SJEM stands for Schweizer Jugend-Einzelmeisterschaft, the Swiss youth individual championship. It is the only one of the four national youth and club championships in which nobody plays for a team: no club sides, no groups, no promotion or relegation. What it has instead is five age categories from U10 to U18, four qualifying tournaments spread across the season, and a final over Whitsun. The 2027 season began on 4 September 2026 in Hergiswil and is decided on 17 May 2027.
You enter yourself
It is the player who enters, not a team. That is the difference from the three team championships: there, clubs enter sides; here, you write to the organiser of a weekend and transfer the fee. Membership of the Swiss Chess Federation is still required, for the qualifiers as much as for the final (Art. 4 para 2). Exceptions have to be applied for.
The federation runs the championship but hands the weekends out. The youth chess commission gives each one to a section or an interest group, with an eye on regional balance (Art. 2 para 2). For the 2027 season that means Hergiswil, Lugano, Genf, Basel: one in central Switzerland, one in Ticino, one in the French-speaking west, one on the Rhine.
The entry is 50 francs a weekend, the same in every category, set by the commission (Art. 2 para 5). Travel and accommodation come on top, and they are the real cost: anyone travelling from Geneva to Hergiswil stays two nights.
Which category a child plays in
What counts is the age reached during the year of the final, not the age on the day (Art. 4 para 1). For the 2027 final that means U10 is born 2017 or later, and U18 is born 2009 or later.
The age limit only says what is too old; it does not say where a player has to enter. A ten-year-old may therefore play the U10, but also the U12, U14, U16 or U18. A younger category is never allowed, every older one is. Strong juniors often enter one category up, because the opponents there have higher ratings and the games are worth more rating points.
Jan Saminskij shows how that shifts over the years. He won the U14 Swiss title in 2026 and is pre-qualified for the 2027 final in the U16.
A qualifying weekend: three short games, four long ones
A qualifier lasts three days, Friday evening to Sunday (Art. 3 para 1), and runs seven rounds of Swiss system (Art. 13 para 1). The first three are played back to back on the Friday evening at 15 minutes plus 3 seconds a move, with no duty to keep score. The four long games follow on Saturday and Sunday, two a day, at 90 minutes plus 30 seconds.
In the long games a draw may not be offered before move 31. A game ended earlier by agreement may be scored 0:0 by the chief arbiter (Art. 10 para 2). Every game counts for the FIDE rating except the three rapid rounds (Art. 9).
Turning up late is not an immediate loss. 30 minutes after the official start still counts as on time, with a warning from the arbiter (Art. 11). The hall is silent and analysis in it is banned, and the commission's code of conduct binds not only the players but accompanying adults and spectators too (Art. 12).
The season's first weekend gives a sense of the size. 244 children and teenagers played in Hergiswil across the five categories, from 42 in the U10 to 59 in the U12. Hotel capacity in Nidwalden is limited, so the club offered beds in the civil-defence shelter at 40 francs a night: bring a sleeping bag, sheets provided. Lunch was 18 francs, macaroni and mince on the Saturday.
How a player reaches the final
There are two ways in, and the short one is direct. Win a qualifier as the best-placed title-eligible player and you are through (Art. 17 para 1). If that player is already qualified, the next one moves up.
Every other place comes out of a points table, and that is the part almost nobody carries in their head. Each tournament yields a single score: 10 times the game points scored, plus place points for the finish (Art. 16 para 1). The place points are a fixed list in the regulations: 50 for the win, 45 for second, 41 for third. The gap between the first places is four or five points; from twelfth place down it is one point per place, to a minimum of one.
The overall table counts the best three single scores out of four tournaments (Art. 16 para 2). The worst weekend therefore drops out, and playing only three costs nothing. A missed tournament does not appear in the table at all. It does not count as a zero.
Two special cases move this again. When a U16 or U18 qualifier is run inside an open, game points count 13-fold instead of 10-fold (Art. 22 para 1), and the regulations do not say why. And a player who misses a weekend because they are playing a European or World Championship or the Chess Olympiad for Switzerland is credited a flat 70 place points (Art. 15a). Only the federation's own selections qualify for that.
The calculator below does the arithmetic. Enter a place and a score per weekend, and the table shows which result is currently the one being dropped.
The final
Sixteen players a category contest it, and eight in the U18 (Art. 24 and 24a). Across all five that is 72 places, and exactly that many finalists started in Zürich in 2026.
Not every place comes from the table. The federation's junior coach may excuse up to two players a category from qualifying before the first weekend, and hand out up to two wildcards. The U18 is exempt from both: there, all eight have to qualify through the tournaments (Art. 24a para 1). For 2027, three players are pre-qualified, two in the U16 and one in the U12.
It runs over four days, seven rounds of Swiss system, at the same time control as the long qualifying games (Art. 25). The Swiss champion is the best-placed title-eligible player. If two of them finish level on points, a play-off decides: first games at 10 minutes plus 10 seconds, and if they are still level, at 5 minutes plus 3 seconds (Appendix 1). Only the title is played for; the rest of the ranking stays as the tournament left it.
In 2026 four of the five gold medals went to Zurich clubs, two to SV Wollishofen and one each to SG Zürich and SC Seebach. Ziad Kanana took the fifth title for SK Bern.
The venue for the 2027 final had not been decided when this was written.
Being allowed to play is not being allowed to win
Playing and winning are two different questions. A player is title-eligible if they hold Swiss citizenship, or live in Switzerland and belong to no foreign FIDE federation (Art. 6 para 1). That is settled before the last qualifier, not before the first.
Also allowed to play are players of a foreign federation resident in Switzerland, and players of the Liechtenstein federation resident in the principality (Art. 6 para 2). They appear in the same ranking list and play for the same prizes.
In practice this means the winner of a qualifying weekend and the player who qualifies directly need not be the same person. Art. 17 gives the ticket to the best-placed title-eligible player, who may be second or third on the list.
The girls’ final is a different tournament
Girls have a final of their own in the categories MU10 to MU18, on its own weekend (Art. 1 para 3). Qualified are those who already qualified directly for a U10 to U18 final or were pre-qualified; then comes one wildcard, and after that the overall table until the field reaches six.
It is played as a round-robin: six players, five rounds, everyone against everyone. The main final, by contrast, is a seven-round Swiss among sixteen. Level on points, Sonneborn-Berger decides, then the head-to-head (Appendix 2). Across five categories that is 30 places, and in 2026 every one of them was filled, in Winterthur.
The commission may adapt this appendix before an edition if too few title-eligible players qualify in a category, or too few enter. The 2027 final is set for 4 to 6 June 2027.
Six weekends, and one collision
The season is six weekends: four qualifiers, the final and the girls’ final. Spread over ten months that is fewer playing days than any of the team championships, but they are whole weekends rather than single days.
Which raises the question of whether a team championship still fits alongside. The answer is almost entirely yes. Against the five SJMM Saturdays and the ten playing and decider days of the SGM, fifteen dates in all, there is exactly one overlap: the SGM play-offs fall on the Saturday of qualifier 4 in Basel.
Only a player whose zone finished level is affected by that. Everything else fits around it. The commissions do read each other’s calendars.
The other three championships
The three team championships are covered elsewhere, each with its own structure:
Where to watch
The qualifiers are relayed, and more widely than the team championships are. In Hergiswil the top four boards of every age group went out live on Lichess and chess.com, and onto a screen in the hall as well. The rapid games were delayed by five minutes, the long ones by fifteen.
Rankings, pairings and start lists are on chess-results per category, every weekend as its own tournament.
- Swiss Chess Federation: youth tournaments
- The federation’s event calendar
- Chess Olympiad Samarkand 2026
Sources
Every rule and article number in this post comes from the Swiss Chess Federation’s SJEM regulations in the version of 1 September 2026. The 2027 dates are taken from the federation’s own event calendar and reconciled against its tournament announcement of 31 August 2026. The entry numbers for the first weekend are counted from the five final rankings on chess-results, and the practical figures come from the organiser’s invitation. The figures and names from the 2026 final come from the federation’s tournament reports.