Getting off the ground

Chess Clubs
1

For the time being, I’m living in northwest Illinois, an area without much – OK, without any – OTB chess activity. No clubs, no tourneys, nothing. I’d like to do something about this. In people’s experience, which is the best way to go about it: to form a club and meet for a while before holding a tournament, or to run a tournament in the hope of attracting enough interest to start a club? How can I communicate with other USCF members in the area?

One of the issues I have here is a lack of available meeting sites in the evening. The public library can’t guarantee meeting space to any club not sponsored by the library itself, but sponsoring an adult club isn’t high on its list of priorities. It also won’t allow tournaments with cash prizes. Park District and hotel facilities rental rates are prohibitive, and neither of the coffeehouses in town is open after 6 PM. I’m thinking my best bet might be weekend days at a coffeehouse, but I don’t know whether the ambient noise of a public location would disqualify it as a tournament site. Anyone else had to deal with these kinds of issues?

2

I grew up in NW Illinois, there wasn’t much chess activity there back in the 60’s, either.

The Dubuque Chess Club had a long history with the Louis Paulsen Open, which hasn’t been held for a few years and hasn’t been in Dubuque since 2002. (Paulsen lived in Dubuque after emigrating from Germany.)

There was someone running events in Rockford, but the last one was in 2007.

Your best bet may be Madison unless you either want to head into the Chicago area or start your own club. There are other USCF members living in or near NW Illinois.

Coffeehouses are fine for skittles, but not for most rated play.

3

I do go into the Chicago area from time to time (June is an excellent month for this, with two Saturday tourneys in Evanston and one in Elgin), but it’s a long haul; Madison’s nearly as far away, and Rockford is dead. That’s why I’m thinking of starting up something closer to home.

4

I suspect Rockford isn’t dead, just dormant in the absence of an active organizer. There are currently 62 USCF members in Rockford and another 40-50 in nearby cities and towns.

5

What I mean is, there’s nothing going on there. “Dormant,” to me, would imply that there existed an organized club that was simply on hiatus while its organizer finished a contract job or something. But there isn’t even a listing for Rockford in the USCF club database anymore. (A couple of years ago, there was.)

I used the TLA tool and found 25 members in northwest Illinois (not counting Rockford), eight of whom have nonprovisional ratings; 82 in neighboring parts of Wisconsin, 32 of them nonprovisional; and 15 in the area of Dubuque, Iowa, two of them nonprovisional. Add Rockford members to these, and there are surely enough players in the area to float a one-day weekend tournament. The challenges are siting and communication.

6

Have you approach the local school system? Around here they allow use of some of their rooms for yoga classes and the like.

7

What do you mean by prohibitive? Some rates that look very high at first can actually turn out to be affordable after a few tournaments. Some can’t.

Alex Relyea

8

Seventy-five to 100 dollars per occasion, minimum. Any tournament entry fee high enough to cover the venue would drive players away. (Players in cities with established chess scenes might not sneeze at a $20 or $30 entry fee, but around here, I’d hesitate to ask for more than $10 unless I had assurance of a substantial turnout.)

I hadn’t thought to talk to anyone in the school district. I’ve worked for the school district, so I might have an in. However, schools can get a little wiggy about having adults gather in their buildings for purposes unrelated to the kids.

9

Check with restaurants about banquet rooms (a local Panera Bread has a “community room” that is free, but can only be booked one month in advance). Also, churches often have rooms that are suitable for chess tournaments (the club I belong to meets at a church, and even hosts tournaments in the sanctuary!).

A local community college or rec. center is also a good choice. Or, in nice weather, find someplace with outdoor seating, set up your board and wait for someone to come along that wants to play.

10

I don’t think that $75-100 is all that much. Of course if the room is very small, then that’s an issue (I remember looking into a room at a college that was rented by the hour. Not going to work for a chess tournament.) The most successful club in this area charges $20-$25 a month for its monthly tournament. I think that if you’re going to charge only $10, you’ll either have to eat some of the costs, or prepare for a very small prize fund. The issue I struggle with is the entry fee to prize fund ratio. Obviously the site charge has to be factored in to that calculation. How big are the rooms you’re looking at for $75-100?

Alex Relyea

11

More than big enough for the six to ten players I’d expect to get.

I’ve caught a lucky break, though. While the library frowns on tournament play because of the money changing hands, it turns out that it’s OK to use the meeting rooms for club play. And I talked to someone I know in the park district who might be able to get me into one of the park buildings under the district’s auspices, and she doesn’t think there’d be any problems with cash tournaments. So I may be ready to move on this.

12

Also check out your local Senior Citizen Center.

Those places are usually busy during the day and often have space available in the evening.

I have used 2 of these with past clubs and they are wonderful. Both places in different cities actually gave us the keys and said to make sure the lights were off and everything was locked before we left. Of course it was free as well.

13

I’ve seen senior centers elsewhere that would have been excellent, but the one here, not so much. It’s the first floor of a senior-living high-rise, situated on a cul-de-sac just off a four-lane U.S. highway, and doesn’t consist of much more than a couple of social services offices. This is not a community that goes the extra mile for its residents.

Except, weirdly but fortunately, for the library, which would grace any town it was in.

14

If you aren’t expecting a big crowd, most of the low-priced motels have a breakfast area and/or a small conference room. (AmericInn, for example.) You might be able to get that for a really low price if you start late enough in the day that you don’t interfere with their breakfast crowd.

(Show up on Saturday afternoon a couple of times and see if it’s generally in use, if not, then anything they can get is gravy.)

You could run a G/30 event with 4 rounds starting at noon and be out of there ahead of supper time.

15

Already checked into that one. The cost is $100 to $250.

16

Yes, those are the challenges, plus one more: you’ll need someone else to help. It’s a whole lot easier to run a chess club with two people than with one. Especially at the beginning, someone needs to show up at the start of every single club meeting and commit to being there the whole time. In the beginning, you’ll only have a few people, and you don’t want them to get there, find no other chess players, and leave. It also helps if there is at least one person who’s willing to greet new players and help them find a game.

None of this is difficult to do, and you still get to play as much chess as the rest of 'em, but it’s easier to guarantee a coordinator at each meeting if there are two people running the club.

It sounds as if you’ve solved the space issue either through the library, or through the park district. If you work through a library or park district, they get to say they have “programming”, and it doesn’t cost them anything to run it. They also increase their usage and traffic, which are desirable things for those who run libraries and park district facilities. Most kids who go to our library chess program in the summer also check out books, as do their parents.

If the money tournaments turn out to be a problem, you’ve got a couple of options. You can run “non-prize” tournaments, as at least three other organizers in Illinois are now doing. You can also try to rent a space from a church, union hall or fraternal organization, which may be more oriented toward renting for the day rather than by the hour.

Publicity. Get a simple web site going right away and make sure it’s key-worded with your town’s name and “chess club”. Affiliate with the ICA, and we’ll list you on our club listing. Get yourself listed in the local newspaper and local web sites in the community activities section. Put up flyers everywhere. Call local high school chess coaches and encourage them to send their players to your club.

Then give it some time. It’ll take a while, but eventually players will find you (most of them by your web site), and not all of them will be USCF rated tournament players.

Good luck. I hope you have as much fun as we’re having. :smiley:

17

I’ve been having the same problem since our former tournament site raised its meeting room rental rates to prohibitive levels.
As a member of the carpenters’ union, I’ve been able to make use of the union hall for free and hold some tournaments there, but I’d like to have more tourneys and for that, I’d need to find a site that I could get more often. There’s lots of other union members who use the hall, too.

18

Hey, Maret! I didn’t realize “Akzidenz” was you. I’ll see you at the U1200 next Saturday. :smiley:

So I’ve made up a flier (for libraries within a 1-hour drive) and a press release (for newspapers in the same area) for our informational meeting, which is scheduled for June 29. I’ll send those out today or tomorrow.

19

David/Rochester, I have a couple of thoughts you might want to try.

First off, I agree with Maret/Akzidenz (Boy, there are a lot of us in Illinois) about working with the park district and YMCAs and other places with programs as such. In Peoria we have a Museum that we meet at and have our chess lessons as part of their catalog offerings for their programs. In Pekin, IL I worked with the park district that ran the Senior Center and got the free space by being on their program as well. It is a nice way in to some of these places for free space.

Anyway getting back to Springfield, IL, have you considered finding a Denny’s or other type of restaurant with a backup dining room where you could meet with your club on a week night? We met at our Denny’s for free. They just want people to buy their beverages and such from them.

Also, don’t be afraid to check out a Hardee’s Restaurant or something like that. There is a version of the Hardee’s restaurants built that have one or two rooms with doors, for privacy, in the lobby area of the place. We have one in Peoria and I have run a chess club there and we have actually run a couple of tournaments there, all for free. The museum is nice, as you know, so we are there. If we ever lost that though, that Hardee’s would be the next best place to be.

20

All the way from Northwest Illinois?! Very cool! :sunglasses: We’re looking forward to it. The last one of these was great, especially the post game analysis.