And I don’t think anyone suggested the correction fee was designed as a salable product
You need to catch up to previous conversations on the topic of the correction fee before deigning to make this comment. Not everything is about you, Mr. Smith.
Besides, others (particularly Mr. Muradian) have commented sufficiently on your observations in this particular thread.
Are you sure your players won’t pay $40 per year for USCF memberships? That’s less than $4 per month. If it’s really an issue you could (a) give big discounts to new players, to lessen the sticker shock of also having to join USCF; (b) have unrated booster sections with USCF memberships as prizes; (c) raise your entry fees a little and offer a combined entry fee and USCF renewal at a discounted price.
I can’t help you there.
Here’s another way to think of it: $40 a year is under 11 cents a day and a tad more than 75 cents a week. You can’t buy much for 75 cents these days, maybe a can of soda but not a Starbucks coffee.
What I did for my events was to offer a rated section and an unrated section. However, if there were not enough people to hold a legitimate unrated section, then I would pay the USCF fee for the players who wanted to play, and they could play rated. That fee started at 12 for the tournament membership, then went to 15 for the three month membership, and now it would be 20. It was common for there to be not enough people to show up and play unrated. (BTW, “enough” I defined as 6, which would be enough for a five round tournament.) So the new fees could add at most an additional 25 dollars to my losses. I typically swallowed about 20 dollars of net losses every tournament.
So I don’t want to proclaim that these new fees would be devastating financially for me. I could swallow 35 bucks every three months, almost as easily as I swallowed 20. The real problem, for me, is that it reinforces my perception of what the USCF is. I want a community of kindred spirits who get together to play a game. The USCF isn’t that. I don’t know exactly how to describe USCF, but whatever it is, it is all wrapped up in prize money. When you are willing to pay the sort of fees necessary to support prize pools, then an extra membership fee on top of that is no big deal. When you just want to get together to play a game, ten dollars to rent a church basement seems reasonable, but an extra 20 on top of it is ridiculous.
It might just be time to head back to the clubs.
I similarly have run unrated tournaments alongside rated tournaments. They have been similarly unsuccessful. I offered prizes of free USCF membership and free entry at a future (rated) tournament, and I think that was for anyone who scored 3/4 or better. Rated players had to be below 1200 to play in the unrated section. The last time I did it, I gave out the prize early to the one player who showed up to play unrated, and put her in the rated section.
I think you are a bit too strict on the cut-off here. I think you could do it with as few as four players (three would mean a significant fraction of the section would get a bye each round). Don’t worry too much about repeating opponents, especially at lower levels.
Alex Relyea
I never said everything is about me. However, you quoted a post of Sevan’s who was responding to a post of mine. Therefore, it was only natural to assume your sarcastic jab (which you’ve done in several threads and isn’t necessary) was at me.
In your opinion.
In the opinion of many of us.
Micah - your energy and enthuse for chess is actually appreciated.
But stop playing the same opening line that gets refuted yet you don’t want to acknowledge it.
I’m not
I’m all for and all about gathering kindred spirits joining together to play a game. I have run a number of completely free to very low cost, $1, tournaments. I called them "Get Together Tournament"s.
I would use a system of phone calling and on occasion emailing to let people know about it. I also used word of mouth to the extreme. They were fun and a good time.
With this in mind, making sure the player was a USCF member was a necessity that was not difficult to take. Most everyone was already a member and rated chess was something they were accustomed to.
Please note that we never had any kind of prize fund pool, ever.
I do understand your situation with newer, non-rated players. If these people are wary of joining the USCF because they don’t know if it is something they want to do, that’s fine and an introductory, 2 month membership will give them a taste of the USCF and rated play for 2 months. In all honesty, most people will realize after that first tournament experience whether they want to do this or not. Telling them of the $20 fee for a taste should really present no problem, when it is presented correctly.
If you have people that don’t want to pay the $40 and only get by once or twice a year, then you have the “cheapo” that wants to play rated Chess at his/her leisure without joining the USCF. Understand, I’m a cheapo myself on a lot of things, so I don’t think being a cheapo is a bad thing.
The only answer I have for a fellow cheapo in regards to Chess is that the $40 a year really isn’t that bad or expensive considering it is for a year.
Now, if it is a requisite for this specific group of kindred spirits that they all have the cheapo quality, then they need to play unrated Chess only. In your instances you mentioned, this would mean that if less than 6 people showed up of this nature, then they would play amongst themselves in that unrated section. Realize that since its unrated, there’s nothing wrong with playing against each other more than once. They could alternate colors the second time. And since it is unrated, there is no problem with that at all.
I have not had, and will not have, trouble directing my opinions as I feel I should.
Your failure to do sufficient research prior to making assumptions is duly noted, as is your failure to acknowledge your erroneous comments based on those assumptions.
Even Thoreau’s “majority of one” concept has its limits. You exceeded those a ways back, I suspect.
I’m concerned that the prices of promotional memberships are rising beyond what a newcomer would be willing to pay on a whim. When I first dipped my toe in the waters of tournament chess, it was the $12 tournament membership, which was deducted from the price of a full-year membership when one made the switch. Then came the $15 three-month membership. Now it’s a $20 two-month membership – pay more, get less.
I understand that the USCF has to get people to become members in one way or another. But if the purpose of a promotional membership isn’t to hook and reel in people who otherwise wouldn’t get involved at all, what is it for? If the up-front price is too high, who’s going to bite on that hook?
It seems to me that the switch from the less expensive three-month membership to the more expensive two-month membership is going to raise an already existing barrier to entry when the USCF needs to lower such barriers. Depending on local activity, a two-month membership may offer entry into no more events than the one-day tournament membership did. And a first-timer who isn’t even sure that he’s a competitive chess player at all isn’t thinking about how many events a two-month membership is going to give him access to – he’s trying to get over the hump of deciding whether to compete today. And so what’s going to deter him, or not, is how much he has to pay today to join this organization that he might not have realized beforehand that he’d have to join.
I realize this decision has already been made and is due to be implemented in a week and a half, but I hope that the executive board and the central office folks are paying close attention and measuring the impact of this policy change on membership figures.
This is the pot calling the kettle black
I believe the new 2MM promotion comes with one issue of CL. So the trial member is getting some additional benefit and USCF exposure that was not provided with the 3MM. That said, I think Mr. Ammann’s concerns are well stated.
My personal preference is the single-tournament membership. However, I will be interested to see what this new promotion brings in terms of conversions. Like all other short-term options, I suspect its success or failure will be tied to the explanations given by TDs and organizers. To that end, some suggested selling points might be a good idea.
If I were in your situation I’d discontinue the unrated sections since they aren’t drawing enough players, but I’d consider offering an entry fee discount to first-time players (first rated tournament).
Mr. Smith really doesn’t understand what he is talking about, does he?
Alex Relyea
He decided to open his mouth and remove all doubt.
If I ever do this again, I’ll do it differently. What I was doing wasn’t working well, so I had to give it up. The 20 dollar membership wasn’t what did in my tournaments. It makes me certain I won’t try again in the manner I tried last time, or in any way that might see me paying out of pocket for trial memberships, but I had already put my tournaments on hold. This latest dues change just makes me decide that there’s no reason to renew my affiliate (up for renewal next month). If I ever come up with some model I think will work better, I’ll try again.
My big problem with this latest change is the message it sends to people like me, or the people who attended my tournaments. USCF is telling people to pay more or stay home. It really feels like they are saying, “We don’t want your kind around here.”
At some point, I have to acknowledge that what I want doesn’t fit in with what a lot of other people want.
Sure, it can be used as a fail safe in the rare scenario you gave but that’s not it’s primary purpose. In regards to the 2-month membership Allen wrote that “We have a membership that someone can use as a promotional tool to introduce a player to the USCF at a lower cost - if cost is really the barrier.” Having this mentioned in the webstore would help affiliates to use this promotional tool.
This is interesting, because by not offering the 2 month adult membership on line, an only offering a product, the
annual adult membership on-line, we are giving the buyer a very definite reason not to buy now. Their perception
(and thus reality, for them, anyhow), that the annual USCF membership is too expensive. It seems that often in
terms of marketing that USCF lives in a perceptive world not shared by the market.
Rob Jones