Carrom Tournament Software with ICF-Accurate Board Scoring

The playing surface is a square between 73.50 cm and 74 cm, on plywood or an equally smooth wood at least 8 mm thick, with a pocket at each corner. Boards are mounted level and lit evenly — a shadow across one corner changes what a player can see.

An ICF board must let a normally smooth 15 g striker run at least three and a half lengths from a base line to the opposite frame when struck at full force. It is a practical test of whether the surface is fast enough for tournament play.

Nine white, nine black and one red queen. Each man is between 3.02 cm and 3.18 cm across and weighs between 5.25 g and 5.50 g, so a set that has been mixed from two boxes is usually detectable by feel.

Larger and heavier than the men: up to 4.13 cm across and up to 15 g. Players are particular about strikers in the way snooker players are about cues, and most bring their own.

A fine powder dusted over the surface to reduce friction. How much to apply, and when to re-dust mid-game, is a genuine tactical question rather than housekeeping.

Carrom spread across South Asia as a household game long before anyone wrote down what a board was worth. Boards were made locally, sizes varied, and house rules decided whether the queen counted three points or five, whether it had to be covered, and how many boards made a game. Two clubs could play each other all evening and disagree about the score at the end.

Organised competition arrived with national associations, first in India and Sri Lanka, which pushed the game towards a single set of numbers. Standardising the board itself mattered as much as standardising the scoring: a slower or faster surface changes which shots are possible, so a national title meant little if the boards were not comparable.

On 15 October 1988 delegates from India, Sri Lanka, the Maldives, Malaysia, Germany and Switzerland met in Madras for the first World Carrom Congress and founded the International Carrom Federation. The ICF is based in Zürich and, as of November 2024, had 19 member associations.

The federation's first job was the one the sport most needed: a single rulebook. The Laws of Carrom were adopted after detailed debate at the second ICF Congress in 1991 in Malé, Maldives, and they settled the questions that house rules had answered differently for decades — the queen at three points, a ceiling of twelve points per board, and a game of 25 points or eight boards, whichever comes first.

The first World Carrom Championship was held in Delhi in 1991, where A. Maria Irudayam took the men's singles and doubles titles. Later editions went to Colombo in 1995, Delhi again in 2000 — won by R. M. Shankara — Colombo in 2004, Cannes in 2008, Colombo in 2012, where Sri Lanka's Nishantha Fernando took the men's title, and Delhi in 2022.

Alongside the Championship, the ICF runs a World Cup series. The sixth edition was played in Milpitas, California, from 10 to 16 November 2024, hosted by the United States Carrom Association with 17 countries and around 150 players; the seventh followed in the Maldives in December 2025. Rashmi Kumari's women's singles world titles in 2000, 2012 and 2022 span almost the whole modern era of the sport.

Europe has had its own competition calendar since 1997, when the Eurocup began rotating around European cities — Berlin, Paris, Rome and Prague among them — coordinated by the European Carrom Confederation. The ICF's member list now runs well beyond South Asia, taking in the Czech Republic, France, Germany, Great Britain, Italy, Japan, Korea, Poland, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the United States.

The pattern outside Asia is club-driven rather than school-driven: a handful of committed clubs run weekly evenings and a national ranking, and the national body sends whoever qualifies to the Eurocup or the World Cup. That structure — many small events, one running table — is what makes carrom a league sport as much as a tournament sport.