Fees for FIDE events

Running Chess Tournaments
1

Fees for submitting FIDE rated tournaments are likely to go up soon, because of changes in how FIDE charges the USCF for rating those events and in how they have to be reported to FIDE.

For Swiss events they charge us 1 Euro per player, for round robin events the charge is based on both the size of the event and its strength (ie category.) A 12 player Round Robin may cost 125 Euros or more.

Where it may get REALLY expensive is if FIDE persists in requiring that we submit the FULL crosstable for the event, not just those players who had FIDE ratable results. (To complicate matters further, there is a cap on the annual fee per year, somewhere around 5500 Euros, but we are not likely to know until late in the year if we will reach that limit.)

For example, the World Amateur Team (formerly known as the USATE) had over 1100 players in it, but only around 160 had FIDE ratable results.

Thus it isn’t clear yet whether an appropriate fee to charge the organizer for that submitting that event to FIDE should be around 160 Euros or 1100 Euros.

2

Raising the fee to 1 Euro per player (or raising it at all) would result in fewer FIDE-rated swisses. (I would certainly drop it from my tournaments.) On the other hand, charging by the player would make round robins more attractive. The way to offend absolutely everyone would be to keep a $35 minimum, while charging by the player for anything larger.

If the USCF does decide to change the pricing structure, it would be necessary to give 4-6 months notice in view of the lead time in planning tournaments.

(BTW, this probably belongs under “Tournament Organization.”)

3

Unfortunately, John, if FIDE is charging the USCF 125 Euros to rate a 12 player RR event, sooner or later the USCF will probably have to pass that fee along to the organizer.

4

Then it should be obvious even to a FIDE official that the result will be far fewer FIDE-rated tournaments.

5

Here are two excerpts from the Financial Regulations section of the FIDE handbook:

The Euro is currently running about $1.35, so a 30 Euro fee (for the lowest categories of RR event) is about $40, a Category 6 event would be around $120. (I can’t find the schedule for what determines the category of an event in the handbook, though.)

I don’t think the RR fee has changed significantly, the USCF has (apparently) been absorbing the cost of those fees above and beyond the $35 we have been charging for FIDE-rated events.

The big change has to do with Swiss events. The way we used to report events, we only reported those players who had FIDE-ratable results. FIDE is now (apparently) requiring that we submit the full crosstable, and is likely to bill us accordingly. Thus the impact is likely to be biggest on events that have a large FIDE-rated section with lots of non-FIDE ratable games in it, like the US Open or the Amateur Teams.

Two important things to note here:

  1. The per-player annual fee is discounted based on our ability to submit events in electronic format. Until we have the ability to report color information on games, I am not sure if we will qualify for that discount.

  2. If more than 20% of the events in a six-month period are reported late (reported to FIDE more than 30 days after the last day of the event), there is a penalty of 70 Euros per late event. Penalties are not subject to the 5200 Euro cap.

The issues of what fees to charge and the effective date of any changes in those fees are matters for the Board (and ultimately the Delegates) to decide. I suspect this will be a part of the budget proposal that the office submits to the Board for the May meeting.

6

Another point worth noting is that the organizer would not know how much to budget for the FIDE rating fee until after the event. Of course, this is true of the USCF rating fee as well, but the FIDE rating fee is larger by nearly a factor of ten.

In a lot of backwater countries, having a “real” rating is probably a big deal. But the USCF already has a rating system, and FIDE ratings are a luxury, not a necessity. I suspect FIDE is going to price itself out of the market.

7 
Or just fewer FIDE-rated Swiss events, particularly from the U.S., which might well be the idea.
8

If they are going to charge ~$150 for a small RR, those aren’t going to be too attractive either.

9

I would assume that if you are running a round robin event, you have a pretty good idea who the players are going to be in advance.

It would have to be at least a CATEGORY 6 RR event to warrant a fee of $150, and that’s not exactly a ‘small’ event.

I still can’t find category information on the FIDE website, but according to the 1989 printed FIDE rulebook a Category 6 event is one in which the average FIDE rating is 2376-2400, using 2200 for players without FIDE ratings or with FIDE ratings below 2205, though I’m not sure if the latter provision is still accurate.

Using that table, the nine-player 4TH NORTH AMERICAN FIDE event on the FIDE website appears to be just a category 1 event, with an average FIDE rating of 2269, so it would have a fee of 30 Euros or about $40, which is about the same as what the USCF is charging today, $35.

As to the size of the fees charged by other countries, check out this link: chess.ca/Gls/02-03GL5.pdf, it
gives the fees Canada charges organizers for FIDE rated events.

Has anyone been on the FIDE Forums recently, I can’t seem to get them to work today? (I wonder if they took them down?)

10

Given what I have learned about FIDE in the last year, I suspect that the issue of fees for large events with lots of non-FIDE rated players in them didn’t even occur to the Technical Commission or the Titles and Ratings Committee. (That’s one of the reasons why I asked to be nominated to those FIDE bodies last June, so that I can represent the USCF’s interests and present things from our point of view.)