The Portland Chess Club and Oregon Chess Federation is planning on making the annual Oregon Open a $10,000 guaranteed tournament next year (more than double to what the guaranteed prize fund has been in the past). How would you allocate the $10,000 if you have the following prizes:
Open section: 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 1st-3rd U2200
U2000 section:1st, 2nd, 3rd, 1st-3rd U1800
U1600 section:1st, 2nd, 3rd, 1st-3rd U1400, 1st-2nd U1200
Before anyone else jumps in, how would you plan to distribute the prizes if you were the organizer of the event? There are multiple ways to do that. If several post their ideas and you don’t like what they propose, you would likely then criticize them. Give us your proposal and let the crowd, who have a lot of experience in organizing and directing events, analyze and critique your prize list. It is possible you will learn how to do things positively through the crucible of constructive criticism.
What’s the EF? What was the previous prize allocation?
Micah,
Commendations for guaranteeing the prize fund. It removes a big item of uncertainty for the players, and removes an easy comparison to gambling (the players aren’t competing for their money; they are competing for your money).
We really need to know the entry fee to give a well educated answer, though. Ten times the advance EF is often cited as an objective for first prize, although all those place and under prizes make that difficult to a degree.
The last Oregon Open had 103 players. How many do you expect to draw to this guaranteed prize fund event? What are your fixed costs? What entry fee were you projecting to charge? Just to break even, given normal expenses, it looks like you would have to charge between $110 to $120 as an entry fee if only 103 showed up. What was charged last year? Can the Oregon state federation afford a loss?
Will there be a scholastic section attached to the above event? I would not expect it to make up for lost money from an open section tournament. It should be able to stand alone. Any profit would be gravy.
If you run a blitz or bughouse tournament or even both in the evening, it would pay for itself and make extra money for the Oregon federation.
Tournament organizing 101!
Everyone is giving Micah good advice, but no one is actually answering his question. He may or may not already have a firm handle on those things, but they are off topic. They HAVE decided to guarantee that much money; he is asking for suggestions on how to spread out the money.
I would ask him two questions actually relevant to the topic:
I would also ask what the entry fee is as others have done. It does puzzle me why he has declined to answer that question. For this purpose I will assume an EF of $100. Keeping in mind that I have never done this before and claim no skill in this area:
Open section: 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 1st-3rd U2200 1200-800-601, 600-450-300
U2000 section:1st, 2nd, 3rd, 1st-3rd U1800 800-600-400, 500-350-200
U1600 section:1st, 2nd, 3rd, 1st-3rd U1400, 1st-2nd U1200700-451-301, 450-350-200, 300-150
I’ve got $300 left over, which I would consider using for either a mixed doubles prize or an unrated prize. I have lowered the prizes for each lower class; if one doesn’t like that they will need that $300 plus somewhat lower prizes all around (probably lowering the third prizes, which are fairly close to the second prizes. I increased a couple of prizes by a buck to ensure that there were no identical prizes, thus ensuring no question about which prize is pulled into any ties.
Critique away!
Between now and February, there are at least a half-dozen GP tournaments that have a $10000 nominal prize fund plus a similar number which are a bit higher but with guarantees more like $10000. If one wanted to, one could research that, and since most of those tournaments have been in existence for several years, one could check to see how many they drew in the past.
We expect the tournament to be similar to the “Portland Chess Club Centennial Open” which we had back in 2011. This was a special tournament celebrating 100 years of the Portland Chess Club. uschess.org/msa/XtblMain.php?201108147221.0
That tournament had a $100 entry fee and $10,000 guaranteed prize fund and distributed the prizes this way:
FIDE RATED CHAMPIONSHIP SECTION — Open to all; total prize fund $4500
PRIZES: $2000-1000-500
U2200: $500-300-200
AMATEUR SECTION—Open to all under 2000; total prize fund $5500
PRIZES: $1000-600-400
U1800: $500-300-200
U1600: $500-300-200
U1400: $500-300-200
U1200/unr: $300-200
That seems to have been a rather successful tournament—an $8000 gross profit seems quite impressive. An interesting question is why they dialed back to $5000 after a $10000 tournament did so well.
At any rate, the only quibbles that I would have with that are
For this tournament we are going to have Open, U2000, and U1600 sections rather than just Open and U2000 like we did previously. If we use the same prize allocation as we did when we just had Open and U2000 sections, the prizes would look like this:
OPEN SECTION PRIZES
1ST, 2ND, 3RD: $2000-1000-500; U2200: $500-300-200
U2000 SECTION PRIZES
1ST, 2ND, 3RD: $1000-600-400; U1800: $500-300-200
U1600 SECTION PRIZES
1ST, 2ND, 3RD: $500-300-200; U1400: $500-300-200
U1200: $300 UNR: $200
Would you recommend staggering the prizes in the U1600 section?
It looks like around 1/3 of the entries from the previous Centennial tournament were under 1600 or unrated. That was almost the same as the amount of players who played in the open section. The projected prize fund seems a little top heavy, putting 45% of the prize fund in the top section, while only 25% goes to the third section. If I were doing the allocation, I would take some money out of the top section and incentivize more under 1600 players to compete.
Example:
Open Section: $1600 - 800 - 500; U2200 $600 - 300 - 200
U2000 Section: $1000 - 600 - 400; U1800 $500 - 300 -200
U1600 Section: $700 - 400 - 200; U1400 $400 - 200 - 100; U1000 $400 - 200 - 100; Unrated $300
The distribution across the three sections would be: 40% -30%-30% and a total of 22 prizes. That would be about 1 prize per every 8 or 9 players, a pretty good ratio for a large tournament. The prizes are in line with the numbers and percentages of class players that were drawn to the previous event. If you are trying to draw unrated players, a modest increase in the offered prize is necessary.
Are you planning on having upset prizes or door prizes for this event? If you can find a couple of hundred other dollars in your budget or have sponsors like a book/equipment concession or local restaurants, you might give out gift cards, clocks, chess sets, books, or software for these types of prizes. A door prize of a book or gift card given every round gets the crowd expectant and excited. This adds to the number of prizes you give out. They improve the atmosphere of the event and are remembered when it comes time for the next tournament.
I’d like to disagree (slightly) with the above. The upper sections should have more prize money than the lower sections, and the dollars-to-EFs ratio should be higher in the upper sections than the lower.
You might want to slightly graduate the EFs, so that the lower players pay a little less than the upper, but the graduation should be less steep with the EFs than it is with the prize money.
Bill Smythe
I’m curious as to what Mr. Smythe is disagreeing with. Mr. Magar’s suggested distribution had 40% in the top section and 30% in the two lower.
Alex Relyea
No U1200 money? That feels odd.
I would stagger the prizes so U1400 was (say) $350-$175-$100 (which also keeps the pattern from the first two sections that the top under money is between 2nd and 3rd place) and U1000 (or U1200) would be slightly smaller than those ($300-$150-$75).
In a tournament where all of the players are paying the same entry fee, it is fairer and smarter to have the lower section have payouts only a little smaller than the top section. When there is too great a difference, the lower rated players feel slighted and do not enter. The top heavy bias in prizes in many tournaments is not attractive to lower rated players, who make up the bulk of the entries. This may be a philosophical disagreement as some organizers think that higher rated players merit being paid a lot more and need to be catered to. As a master as well as a tournament organizer, I think high rated and low rated players put their pants on pretty much the same way every day. Lower rated players work just as hard, maybe even harder, than I do when we compete. I value their attendance in tournaments I play in or direct. When they are shelling out big money to play, they should be rewarded if they are successful. This is what I was advised to do by wiser organizers way back when I started directing.
None of the numbers I wrote down are written in stone, but are good starting points for determining the prize distribution. Note that I looked at the number of players in each class that came to the tournament in the previous year in order to figure out the prizes. There were 57 players who were under 1600 or unrated who played in that tournament. That is almost one third of the event. It makes sense to provide at least 30% of the prize fund for them, not 25% or less… There is a good chance that even more of this group of players will compete as there are few tournaments of this quality and size of prizes for them.
At first, I mistyped U1000 for U1200 in the prize list. Then I looked at it again and thought that this was probably a good prize break, given the previous year’s list of players. There is a likelihood that there will be less of a conflict if an U1000 player is eligible to win an U1400 prize, but there will probably be more U1000 players in the event. In the other sections, the spread of ratings is about 600 points from top to bottom. In the U1600 section, you have a wider range of players. Providing prizes to the lower range, too, seems good to me. This should attract more kids, and more novice level adults.
Then why are you a master and they are not. Do you think you have a rare innate talent for the game?
Innate talent? No. Hard work and more experience, probably more than most. Many masters I know have more chutzpah, crazy daring, and stubbornness than other players, but I see those traits in others, too. I know quite a few very intelligent and accomplished people who do not have great facility for the game. It is a vision/spatial perception thing for them rather than a matter of how hard they work at the board. I do know a couple of masters who think they know everything about everything just because they have a high rating. They have less social skills than a rabbit. Not very cuddly either.
When I organize an event, I think of all of the players, not just the few outliers. In the given tournament setting, the higher rated players are being well accommodated. If I want a tournament to be successful, I know that most of my money and profit are going to come from the lower sections, not the top section. My focus as an organizer is not only on the size of the prizes but the number of them. When the players think they have a shot at earning some type of prize, they come to play. That is why I like door prizes, the new mixed doubles prizes, and other incentives.
Din, Ding, Ding…and we have a winner!!
Do you think masters in general have less social skills than average players? If yes, is it not because the masters devote themselves to the game more than an average player?
Is that because this arrangement maximizes organizer’s total profit (minimizes total loss), or is it done routinely as a favor by organizers to the higher rated players to organizers’ financial detriment?