Award prizes for club / local

Running Chess Tournaments
1

Hi club and local TDs:
Here is an interesting tournament to award prizes for. Give it a try and quote the applicable rule.
FYI, standard USCF tie break.

Regards, Ernie

Prizes 1st $60 & Championship Trophy
2nd $50
U1800 $40
U1650 $35 & Amateur Trophy
U1400 $30

No. Name Rate Pts TBrk1 TBrk2 Rnd1 Rnd2 Rnd3 Rnd4
1 Barnakov, Yuri A 2180 4.0 6.5 7.5 W29 W24 W12 W4

2 Connelly, Kevin 1748 3.5 5.0 5.0 -H- W30 W8 W7

3 Kremenchugskiy, Ilya 1840 3.0 5.5 5.5 L4 W14 W16 -X-
4 Pham, Minh-Quan D 1504 3.0 9.0 9.0 W3 W11 -X- L1

5 Keskar, Himanshu A 1875 2.5 8.0 9.5 D8 W9 L6 W19
6 Abbrey, Pastor 1626 2.5 4.0 4.0 -H- W21 W5 -U-
7 Haines, Craig W 1608 2.5 6.5 6.5 W23 -H- W22 L2
8 Koch, Rick 1517 2.5 7.5 8.5 D5 W27 L2 W22
9 Lestyan, Miklos 1506 2.5 5.0 5.0 -H- L5 W27 W18

10 Miller, Daniel I 2319 2.0 1.5 3.0 W25 W18 -U- -U-
11 Carson, Keith R 2003 2.0 2.5 5.0 W14 L4 W24 -U-
12 Schaub, Nicholas P 1632 2.0 4.0 8.0 W15 W20 L1 -F-
13 Andersen, Timothy 1569 2.0 3.0 5.0 -H- L22 W26 D15
14 Luo, Andrew H 1531 2.0 4.0 6.5 L11 L3 -X- W21
15 Kohn, John C 1394 2.0 3.5 7.0 L12 W28 D18 D13
16 Blair, Gordon 2.0 2.5 5.0 L18 -X- L3 W24

17 Flores, E Rodney 1988 1.5 0.0 1.5 -H- W19 -F- -U-
18 Dobrydnev, Boris 1560 1.5 6.0 9.0 W16 L10 D15 L9
19 Brown, Maxwell L 1510 1.5 4.0 6.5 -H- L17 W23 L5
20 Means, Donald G 1372 1.5 0.0 2.5 W30 L12 -H- -U-
21 Giofreda, Chris Br 1237 1.5 1.5 4.5 -H- L6 W30 L14
22 Goodrich, Michael 1218 1.5 4.5 7.0 -H- W13 L7 L8
23 Audrain, Kevin R 1.5 3.0 5.5 L7 D25 L19 W30

24 Pham, Long-quan D 1435 1.0 5.0 9.0 W28 L1 L11 L16

25 Wasserbauer, Gerard 1559 0.5 1.5 4.5 L10 D23 -U- -U-
26 Dixon, Lonnie J 1367 0.5 0.0 2.0 -H- -U- L13 -U-
27 Brinda, Carlton J 0.5 2.5 5.0 -H- L8 L9 -U-

28 Robinson, Gary T 1817 0.0 1.0 3.0 L24 L15 -F- -U-
29 Blair, Charles M 1552 0.0 0.0 4.0 L1 -F- -U- -U-
30 Penwell, Ellsworth 957 0.0 5.0 8.5 L20 L2 L21 L23

2

Maybe I don’t get what the problem is…except that some of the ratings are missing.

1st-#1
2nd-#2
U1800-#4 and amateur trophy
U1650-#6
U1400-#15

3

1st-#1 & trophy
2nd-#2
U1800-#4 and amateur trophy
U1650 - Not enough information.
U1400-#15

4

You can safely assume the three players listed with no rating are, in fact, unrated. In fact, if you check MSA, you’ll find these three are indeed unrated.

So there is enough information.

Bill Smythe

5

Even with the assumption that the three players were unrated, there isn’t enough information to decide who or how many players get a piece of the under 1650 cash.

6

How so? You have the entire crosstable. The only way there could be “not enough information” would be if you didn’t know whether a standard rule or a variation were being used. With the problem as stated, it’s safe to assume you should use the standard rule.

Bill Smythe

7

What’s not clear to me is whether there’s a single U1650 prize that consists of cash plus a trophy, or whether there’s a cash prize and a separate trophy prize that may be awarded together or separately, or whether the two must be awarded separately.

8

Do we know if “-U-” is always a withdrawal or could it sometimes be a 0-bye?

9

I am curious to know what -X- denotes. As I recall it stands for a forfeit win. Assuming that -X- does stand for forfeit win and not a full point bye, which I recall is a -B- (I can’t find a legend on USChess.org), there doesn’t appear to be any full point byes in this event. Making another assumption that there weren’t assigned byes, then there is a good chance that there was a houseplayer in the tournament. Player 6 is the most likely candidate for the houseplayer since he did not play in neither round one nor four. Without a rule book handy, I recall that houseplayers may or may not be eligible for prizes with this decision left up to the TD.

Also, player 6 did not finish the full schedule. The decision to award prizes to a player who withdraws from the tournament is also at the discretion of the TD.

Thus, player 6’s eligibility for a prize is at question.

10

In my first reply, i meant to say U1650-#6-9

11

I used WinTD to run this tournament to get ready for Atlanta. The X is a forfeit win. The U is an unplayed game. You can’t tell if someone withdrew from the WinTD crosstable. In the posted prizes for the tournament, I allowed unrateds to be eligible for the U1650 prize.

Postby anjiaoshi on Fri Apr 16, 2010 7:03 am #187863
What’s not clear to me is whether there’s a single U1650 prize that consists of cash plus a trophy, or whether there’s a cash prize and a separate trophy prize that may be awarded together or separately, or whether the two must be awarded separately.

This is not important if you are familiar with rule 33D2 and the associated variation. This rule is the primary reason I posted the problem. I was hoping that someone would give Pham the U1800 prize and the U1650 trophy to someone else. As I did not state that 33D2a was being used, one should assume that 33D2 applies.

Post by Grant Perks on Fri Apr 16, 2010 3:16 am
Even with the assumption that the three players were unrated, there isn’t enough information to decide who or how many players get a piece of the under 1650 cash.

Why not Grant? Did any of the unrateds score put them in a tie with the players who qualified to win the U1650 prize? Bill Wong got it right in his corrected post. You would be correct for the U1400 cash. I should have noted that.

Regards, Ernie

12

As I stated above, player 6 might or might not be eligible for any prizes. Had he withdrawn from the tournament some TD’s would not award him a share of any prize.

13

And that is the default on page 184:
32C1. Withdrawals. Unless the director decides otherwise, players who fail to complete the tournament are not entitled to prizes.

14

As soon as I saw the original post, along with its prize list and its plea to “quote the applicable rule”, I suspected that the point of the post was the prizes-calculated-separately rule vs the trophy-follows-the-money variation. Sure enough, when I worked out the prizes, it turned out that one player wins the U1650 cash while another wins the U1650 trophy.

But, since the post was titled “Award prizes for club / local”, I didn’t want to jump in with a spoiler, as I have considerably more directing experience than the typical club / local, and I wanted to let the latter group have a crack at it. So, instead of answering, I dropped a couple of hints:

I also tried to defuse what I thought was a red herring (“not enough information”), but then came another explanation, bye-vs-forfeit. So it’s not quite a red herring after all, because the bye-vs-forfeit distinction could determine whether there is a 3- or 4-way tie for one of the prizes.

That quibble, however, distracted from the intended main point, which is that money and trophy prizes should be calculated separately.

I was a bit disappointed that nobody nailed this one. One poster came close:

– but he omitted the final two steps: (1) looking in the rulebook, and (2) finding 33D2.

Bill Smythe

15

Excuse me, but why should I waste time looking in the rulebook when I don’t know what I’m looking for? Isn’t it up to the organizer to specify whether he means “Top U1650 player gets cash and a trophy” or “There’s a cash prize for an U1650 player, and there’s also a trophy for a U1650 player – now figure out who gets which”? Or was this whole thing an exercise in how to adjudicate a sloppily worded prize announcement?

16

I think it was an exercise in vaguely recalling (as a result of reading the rulebook in the first place, as the first step toward becoming a TD) that the rulebook included a discussion of prizes-calculated-separately vs trophy-follows-the-money, and thus knowing what to look for, and being able to find it.

I believe Ernie has been active in writing TD certification exams, and probably still is. So his post was designed to do what any good open-book exam does, i.e. to get people noticing, thinking, and looking.

Bill Smythe

17

I think it was also a good example to demonstrate that, absent an announced variation (that the trophy follows the money), the rules call for a possibly counterintuitive prize allocation. (Well, at least it is a bit counterintuitive to me to split the trophy from the money.)

I’m guessing this would surprise a fair number of players as well, and perhaps even organizers.

18

Calculating the prizes separately may seem counterintuitive at first glance, but in practice the opposite policy would often turn out even more counterintuitive, and even ridiculous. In this case, for example, it would result in the U1650 trophy going to an U1650 with 2.5 instead of an U1650 with 3.0, even though the latter would win no other trophy either.

Or, if the TD wants to somehow consider the prizes “together”, rather than calculating them separately OR letting one follow the other, he would first have to ask himself, which is the more valuable prize, $40 with no trophy, or $35 plus trophy? Either answer is likely to cause arguments, and that answer will affect the distribution in this case (as if there weren’t enough complications already).

I like rule 33D2 just the way it is. And I like the fact that the rulebook writers gave a lot of thought to these kinds of questions before deciding which version should be main-line and which should be the variation.

Bill Smythe

19

I’m guessing that any TD who words his prize announcements that ambiguously deserves whatever tsuris he gets.

Well, wouldn’t the most sensible time to look up that discussion be before you decide what prizes to award?

20

Well, how would you word the prize announcements in this particular case?

I don’t think the wording is the primary issue here. It’s natural, if both cash and trophies are being award, to have some prizes of the form “$$$ plus trophy”. But unforeseen consequences can arise, which 33D2 deals with quite well.

I agree that any organizer who awards both cash and trophies should become thoroughly familiar with 33D2 (and the surrounding rules) before showing up at the tournament.

Bill Smythe