What exactly is the SMM?
The Swiss Team Championship is the federation’s largest competition: 349 teams across six leagues, from National League A down to League 4. Here is how it is built.
SMM stands for Schweizerische Mannschaftsmeisterschaft, the Swiss Team Championship. It is the federation's largest competition: in the 2026 season it is 349 teams across 49 groups. Play club chess in Switzerland and sooner or later you play it. The grandmaster in National League A and the club member playing a first tournament game are in the same championship, just on different rungs of it.
A league system for clubs
The SMM is a league system, the way football is. Clubs enter teams, the teams are drawn into groups, and over a season every group plays a full round-robin. Win your group and you can go up; finish at the bottom and you go down. The winner of National League A is Swiss team champion.
Six leagues stacked up: National League A, National League B, then Leagues 1 to 4. Upwards it narrows and gets stronger. National League A is a single group of 10, and a club may field only one team in it, the first team. Downwards it widens: League 3 alone has more groups than the three upper leagues put together.
Tap a tier to see how it is built.
A match: eight boards at once, fewer further down
Two teams meet on one day, usually at the home club, and in the upper leagues play 8 boards simultaneously. Board 1 against board 1, board 2 against board 2, and so on. In the Nationalliga the board order is tied to the team's registered player list, and a player may move at most two boards from it. In Leagues 1 to 4 it is free: there the captain lines up as they like.
The time control is a long one: 40 moves in 90 minutes, then 30 minutes, plus 30 seconds per move from move one. A match therefore runs four to five hours. Leagues 2 and 3 play six boards, League 4 four.
Match points decide the table
There are board points and match points, and they do different jobs. People mix the two up.
Board points are the games: a win is one, a draw a half. Over eight boards a match is won at 4½. Match points are the table: two for winning the match, one for drawing it, none for losing. Teams are ranked on match points. Board points are only the first tiebreak.
That is why a team can finish above another on fewer board points. ASK Réti finished third in 2026 with 40 board points, ahead of Winterthur on 41½. Try it.
From National League B down, play is regional
National League A is one national group. Play in it and over a season you travel from Geneva to Lake Constance. Below it the federation splits the field so that a match does not cost a whole weekend.
National League B has two groups, east and west. From League 1 down there are four regions: East, Central, North-west and West. A League 4 team therefore stays in its own corner of the country instead of crossing Switzerland.
Many clubs field several teams, spread across the leagues. Search for a club and you see every team it entered.
Going up and going down
Both group winners of National League B go straight up to National League A. In every other league the top two of a group cross-play promotion matches against the top two of a neighbouring group; the winners go up.
Relegation is simpler: the bottom two of every group go down. Nobody is relegated out of League 4, because there is nothing below it.
The SJMM, for juniors up to twenty
Anyone who turns at most twenty has a second team championship alongside this one: the SJMM, on four boards, over five Saturdays between December and June. It does not replace the SMM. Neither set of regulations rules the other out, and because the SJMM plays on Saturday and the Nationalliga mostly on Sunday, both fit into one year.
What the SJMM is and how it is built: What exactly is the SJMM?
Alongside it runs the SGM, played on Saturdays and with smaller teams: What exactly is the SGM?
A junior who would rather play for themselves has the SJEM: What exactly is the SJEM?
Redrawn every year
Because two teams go up and two come down out of every group, the allocation looks different every season. A club whose second team sits in League 2 here may be in League 1 or League 3 next year. The groups and team lists in this post are the ones for 2026.
The cycle itself repeats. Clubs enter by early November. The group allocation, meaning who plays in which league and group, comes out late November to December. The Spielplan with the dates follows January to February, and has to reach team captains at least a month before round one. Play starts mid-March.
Seven months, nine rounds
An SMM season runs for seven months. It starts in spring and ends in autumn, and several weeks often pass between two rounds. National League A plays nine rounds, as a rule seven on a Sunday and two on a Saturday; where a round clashes with an international tournament, a third Saturday is allowed.
The last two rounds of National League A are played centrally: all five matches on the same weekend in the same hall. The championship is decided there. It is the only weekend where two rounds, forty games each, run side by side. A season's exact dates are in the Spielplan, which the federation publishes the winter before.
Where to watch
The federation relays National League A live on Lichess, with all five matches and all eight boards. Tables and pairings for every league are on chess-results, linked from the federation's own page.
- Lichess: Swiss Team Championship 2026, National League A
- chess-results: tables and pairings
- Swiss Chess Federation: SMM
Sources
Every figure in this post comes from the Swiss Chess Federation's SMM/SGM regulations and from the official group allocation for the season 2026.