What exactly is the SJMM?
The Swiss Youth Team Championship runs over five Saturdays, on four boards, in four categories — and it does not rule the SMM out. Both in the same year is allowed.
SJMM stands for Schweizerische Jugend-Mannschaftsmeisterschaft, the Swiss Youth Team Championship. It runs over five Saturdays from December to June and is open to anyone who turns at most twenty. Last season it had 117 teams, 15 more than the year before and more than ever. The SMM, the adult championship, does not rule it out: both in the same year is allowed. This is the 20th edition.
You may play both championships
A junior does not have to choose. The SMM and the SJMM are two separate competitions: one is run by the tournament commission, the other by the youth chess commission, each under its own regulations. Neither set of regulations mentions the other.
The SMM regulations limit a player’s appearances expressly "pro Turnier (SMM und SGM)", that is per competition, meaning within the SMM and, separately, within the SGM. The SJMM regulations say in Art. 5 para 3 only that a player "may play for one club in the same season", and mean their own season by it. A clause ruling out one because of the other does not exist anywhere.
In practice the day of the week settles it. The SJMM always plays on Saturday. Art. 8 para 1 of the regulations opens with four words: "Gespielt wird am Samstag." The SMM Nationalliga plays mostly on Sunday. The seasons overlap in months but not in days: both are drawn below, and you can see that the last two SJMM Saturdays sit in the middle of the SMM season.
The load is small: five match days a year. A junior who plays both championships has a dozen-odd match days, spread over twelve months.
How the SMM itself is built is the subject of the post before this one: What exactly is the SMM?
Four categories instead of six leagues
The build is a league system: clubs enter teams, the teams are drawn into groups, every group plays a full round-robin, and teams go up and down at the end. It is all smaller than the SMM, 117 teams against 349, and instead of six leagues there are four categories.
Two groups of six at the top in National A, four groups of six in National B below them, then Regional 1 with 10 groups and, at the bottom, Regional 2 for beginners. The shape is not a pyramid: Regional 1 is the widest category and Regional 2 beneath it is a little over half its size. It is held at all only if enough teams enter.
Tap a category, then a group, to see the clubs.
Look up your own club
Most readers want to know what their own club does. Plenty of clubs enter teams in both championships, and a club playing League 3 in the SMM may well have a youth team alongside it in the regional league.
The federation keeps the two lists apart and does not write club names the same way in them: "Winterthur" in the SMM, "SG Winterthur" in the SJMM. Both are searched here, shown side by side, and not merged.
A match day is a whole day
In the SMM a round is one match on one day. In the SJMM four to eight teams meet in the same hall on a match day and play up to 2 rounds: one in the morning between 10 and 10.30, one in the afternoon between 2 and 2.30, with at least half an hour between them. That is how the season fits into five match days.
That is how a group of six gets through its 5 rounds in only 4 Saturdays of play. The host is one of the participating clubs, and every club that enters has to run one or two match days itself. It comes with the entry.
4 boards are played, in every category. Four players per team per match, no more. A team that names fewer leaves the rear boards empty; a match counts as played when both teams filled at least half their boards.
In the National categories the line-up is not free. It has to follow playing strength roughly: no player may be put ahead of one rated more than 100 Elo above them, and an unrated player may not be put ahead of anyone above 1550. National League A plays 90 minutes a game, the regional leagues 60, plus 30 seconds a move. Since 1 January 2026 every game counts for the FIDE rating list “as far as that is possible”, not just those in the national categories.
Match points, board points, and then the board weighting
Scoring works as in the SMM: two match points for winning a match, one for a draw, none for a loss, and teams are ranked on match points. Level on those, board points decide, then the head-to-head result.
If that settles nothing either, the Brettwertung decides, a board weighting. It counts which boards a team won on rather than how many games. A win on the last board is worth one point, on the second-last two, and so on upwards.
A win on board 1 is therefore worth four times a win on board 4. Win on the top boards and you win the decider, even when the matches themselves finished level.
The final, in one day
A final tournament on the last match day decides the National A champion, not the table. The semi-finals are cross-paired: first in the west against second in the east and the other way round. Then come the final and the third-place match. The promotion matches run on the same day.
If a final is level after the classical games, it is replayed with the same pairings and reversed colours at 10 minutes plus 5 seconds a move. If that is not enough, the board weighting comes back, and if even that is equal the team with the lower average rating wins.
The 2026 final needed the first of those steps. SG Winterthur and Echallens drew 2:2, Winterthur took the rapid playoff 3:1 and kept the title. Colin Federer played in that team, and in the same year for Switzerland at the Chess Olympiad.
Who may play
Eligible are federation members who turn at most 20 in the year of the final. For the 2027 season that means born in 2007 or later. There is no lower limit.
There are no age brackets inside the SJMM. Teams are drawn by strength, not by year, so a ten-year-old and a nineteen-year-old can sit on neighbouring boards of the same team.
It is the team that is entered, not the player, and the club that enters it. There is no entry fee; travel and venue hire are on the clubs. Every team needs a captain who knows the rules of chess. The regulations say in as many words that accompanying adults without that knowledge may not serve as one.
When each piece is published
Unlike the SMM, whose next-season dates are still missing in the autumn before it, the SJMM is early. The invitation appears early August to mid-September, about ten months before the final. The first match day falls mid-November to early December, and the group allocation comes a few weeks before the first match day.
The invitation gives the end of September as the entry deadline. It does not appear to bind: in late October 2026 the federation's registration page still read "Die Anmeldung für die SJMM 2027 ist eröffnet", and the form named no deadline at all. A club that is late should ask the tournament office rather than treat the date in the PDF as final.
So the 2027 dates have been fixed for a long time. The team lists in this post are the 2026 ones: the allocation for 2027 was not published when this was written. In National A and B little changes anyway. The groups there carry over apart from promotion and relegation.
Where to watch
The SJMM is not relayed live. Rounds, tables and statistics for all four categories are on the federation’s own pages, with an archive back to 2011.
Sources
Every figure and rule in this post comes from the Swiss Chess Federation’s SJMM regulations, from the invitation to the 2027 season and from the 2026 group allocation. The team lists are reconciled against that season’s fixture lists. The comparison with the SMM comes from the SMM’s own regulations, and the final result from the federation’s tournament report.
The regulations and the invitation disagree on one number. Art. 15 gives 90 minutes for both National A and National B. The invitation departs from it in some years and not others. For National B it says 75 in 2025 and in 2027, but 90 in 2026. This post follows the regulations; anyone playing National B is better off asking the tournament office.