Say a chess club wants to offer rated games to its members. You come in, sign up, and whoever wants to play rated games will be paired for one game per meeting. Is this rateable? Would it count as match play, or not? Does it matter if the results are sent in to USCF every week, every month, every x number of weeks? What if players are paired against opponents more than once? I know of clubs that offer the option, I’m just wondering how it gets rated?
Yes, you can just play rated games at the club, without a tournament. Its actually a good way for players to get used to tournament conditions, having to get used to writing down moves, pushing the clock, managing their time on the clock, etc. With rating points on the line, players should get a bit more of an adrenalin rush than playing skittles, and be more wary of thier play.
Also, if some players tend to get overly cautious (playing too defensively) at tournaments, having rated games on a regular basis should eventually get them used to playing for rating points, and hopefully start to play a more balanced game.
I’d think they’d want the results at least monthly, since rating are adjusted on a monthly basis.
I don’t know the exact procedure to use in order to send in the results, but I"m sure someone here will be more than happy to assist you with that.
Keep in mind that the ratings formula really DOES NOT CARE why two players are playing. We only worry about who plays who because of the potential to manipulate ratings, which is why we have things like restriction on rating matches, limits on total points that can be gained or lost from match play over a period of time, no bonus points if two players meet more than twice in an event, etc.
Thus I don’t see any problems with rating events like that, either. They’re similar to ladders, though with even less structure. Program like SwisSys and WinTD should be able to handle it by manually forcing the pairings, the biggest challenge may be that depending on who shows up you might have to create multiple rounds on a single day with lots of unpaired players in them.
During validation you may get some notes about players having the same opponent more than once, that’s there mainly to help catch data entry errors in events where players would not face the same opponent more than once.
We do recommend that you submit rating reports about once a month for events like this.
You could try doing tournaments instead of just randomly having people play each other. The “one game per week” format for a 4 round Swiss has been used successfully by a few clubs down here. The up side is that you have prize money, and people are more likely to show up more than once if they’ve paid for 4 weeks of play. The down side is that people who can’t show up every week might not want to pay for all 4 weeks. But some of the clubs will let people who show up infrequently sit in as “house players”, or just pay 1/4 of the entry fee to only play one week, without being eligible for prizes.
We plan on running a small chess league as an experiment this winter to promote USCF rated chess activity. Pairings will be made as players come in. We will try to keep matchups as equal as possible. The results will be sent in after each four week session. The player who gains the most rating points or best performance rating or highest score will get a prize from our club. Players will chip in a buck per game. Probable time control will be Game 60; most of the members aren’t fond of Game 30. Likely we will hold an unrated section,too. The idea for this popped up after reading this thread. Club response was very enthusiastic so far. I want to introduce more kids to tournament play.