To them it is. Sad but true, the human condition, etc. etc.
On another thread there’s a proposal for running girls’ tournaments unrated and I say it would be good to run boys’ tournaments unrated too in the same age groups. The relentless pressure of rating points can get people to do bad things. If they were competing to win a tournament but there weren’t the rating points at stake, there would be some cheating but probably much less of it. The directors could focus attention on the games where the title might be at stake and expect few problems from the other boards.
Basically I don’t like ratings very much. Do we need a statistically valid measure of how good a given 8 year old is – or was several months ago? I don’t see much benefit to it. Do others think that kids – girls or boys – would be less interested in unrated events than rated ones?
Maybe unrated tournaments would be nearly as popular with the kids, I’m not sure. I think a few of the most serious players would be less interested, but it might not make a big difference.
Unfortunately we live in the real world, and I think we need to realize that it’s not just the kids that have to be satisfied. I think a much larger proportion of parents are interested in rating points. You need to keep them happy also. Maybe in some idealistic sense, parents are less important, but it’s the parents that TAKE THEM TO THE TOURNAMENTS. If parents have a choice between a rated tournament and an unrated one, which do you think they’ll pick? There’s a reason so many scholastic tournaments ARE rated. If this wasn’t in demand, organizers wouldn’t do it.
Based on the number of emails that we get, I think there are quite a few players at all age and rating levels who are extremely interested in their rating. And there are probably parents who are more interested in their children’s rating than the kids are.
I think the number of corrections being made is going up, not because the error rate is increasing but because the detection rate is increasing. I think we get several emails a week from players who have found errors in their recent events. (All correction reports must come from the TD, or at least be verified by the TD.)
I think the answer is going to depend on the total cost of rated vs unrated.
I ran an event last weekend that had only about 25 kids in the two kids sections (about half of what it drew 4-5 years ago), though one of the players in the reserve section runs non-rated events in Omaha (55 miles away) that draw well over 100 players. I think only about three of the kids in this event were from the Omaha area.
Moreover, this event is membership exempt (because it is part of the Cornhusker State Games and events that are part of a state games are exempt under a PB policy that dates back to 1989) and the total entry fee for online entries was $20, which included a t-shirt.
Maybe the distance, the price of gas or the typically hot July weather (100 degrees) affected turnout?
I’m beginning to think we may need some kind of tournament membership for kids, I just don’t know what to price it at without impacting USCF revenues negatively. If a total cost of a rated event of $20, including a T-shirt, is too high, I honestly don’t know where the threshhold is.