I directed a tournament this past weekend in which a foreign GM participated. I was under the impression that the USCF gave all GMs complimentary membership, yet when I submitted the rating report online the GM was flagged as a non-member. Will I have to submit a membership for this GM to get the online site to accept the report? Also, have I misunderstood the USCF policy regarding the membership of GMs?
– Hal Terrie
You have to use the “Membership Exception Form” to request special action. This is one of the less successful parts of the on-line submission system.
If you know that a foreign IM or GM is playing in your event in advance (and I would hope you do know that), you can submit a ‘non-member’ maintenance transaction for that person before the event is held, so you have an ID to use in the rating report.
A ‘FIDE’ exception request which has the player’s country code and FIDE ID in it will generally be processed automatically, providing the player is listed in FIDE records as being a foreign IM, GM, WIM or WGM. (I just finished updating our records to include the July FIDE rating list, so we’re about as current as possible.)
A TD who follows both of the above steps should be able to get his event rated without the USCF office having to intervene. I saw several such requests from the World Open, for example. All were processed automatically.
Foreign titled players in the process of becoming US residents are still a bit of a problem, the office probably still has to handle those exception requests manually. As I recall, though, only GMs who are registered with FIDE under the USA flag get complimentary USCF memberships, not IMs. As I interpret it, that means an IM who moves to the USA has to pay USCF dues.
If anyone can come with a better mechanism to handle foreign titled players who don’t have a USCF ID already (other than adding the roughly 5000 FIDE titled players to the USCF database), please let me know.
Change the “exception request” to a new (on-line only) membership category with price $0. Since you say you are already processing the “FIDE exception requests” automatically, this would have the same effect without the bafflegab. (Though my preference would be to flag them for human attention before finalizing.)