With great assistance from the posters in this forum, yesterday (Saturday) we completed our first scholastic chess tournament.
While we had 65 players registered, only 52 were able to participate. Fortunately, I was able to get enough elementary players to run the section. Our High School section was our largest section with 26 players.
Unfortunately, this was not a rated tournament, although I ran it exactly as I would (or think I would) if it were. This was essentially a full dress rehearsal for next year’s plan to run the tournament as a rated tournament.
The great news is that the tournament ran smoothly…at least it ran like a duck on water. To the players, parents, and coaches/teachers/school sponsors, it seemed like it smoothly moved from one round to another. The reality is that underneath the water, I was paddling my tail off.
Here are a few of my lessons-learned.
Preparation truly is essential. I’m fortunate that I spent so much time anticipating all of the possible snags and building in systems to account for it. It’s not that everything ran perfectly, it didn’t…but I had an answer for everything that came up. It certainly made me scramble at times, but I never felt out of control.
For a first tournament this size (I know, it’s not really that big), I was very fortunate to have two gentlemen who served as my floor TDs. This allowed me to run the pairings, volunteers, check the “skittles” room, and make sure that everything else went well.
Scholastic chess games go quick…but not all of them. We were playing G30 d/0 games and on average 75% of the games were done by the 30 minute mark. Realizing this allowed me to adjust my battle rhythm to be the following: 0-10 minutes of round–make sure there are no issues in the game hall; 10-20 minutes–run over to the “Skittles” room and make sure that everything was running smoothly; 20-30 minutes–back to the game hall as games began to come to a close; 30-40 minutes–start putting results into WinTD and pair those rounds completed; 40-60 minutes–ensure boards of completed games are ready for the next round; and within 5 minutes of the last game of the three sections, I had my charts and pairings printed and ready to post.
I made the decision to begin all three sections’ rounds at the same time. A fear was that one of the sections would be finishing far before the others, but while a section might finish before the other two, it really wasn’t the same section all of the time. Moreover, the difference wasn’t more than about 10 minutes. I planned to begin the rounds 20 minutes after the last game of all three sections finished. This actually worked out right. I didn’t have a dedicated lunch break, so it gave all the kids enough time to grab a bite from our PTSO concession stand, use the restroom and relax.
Which brings me to the "skittles’ area. We used our gym which had plenty of room for everyone. We brought in several tables and chairs (plus there was seating in the stands). Our PTSO was selling snacks and drinks. I had a giant chess board set up which was a hit with the kids. I played four chess-related films in the background. Every time I went in, the room was buzzing and parents (as well as kids) were enjoying the breaks.
Communicate, communicate, communicate. Prior to the tournament, I had been in close contact with all of the sponsors of the schools who had teams. I made sure everyone knew what to expect. I sent to the parents of every player I had emails for, a Frequently Asked Question document that went over how the tournament was going to run, what they should bring (not much, I was able to supply all boards, sets, clocks, score sheets, and even pencils). The result is that I didn’t spend a lot of time answering questions from inquiring players and their parents.
In the end, it really went off well. As icing on the cake, two of my students won the High School 1st and 2nd place individual and our school won the High School Team championship. Not a bad day at all.
To everyone who added their input as I prepared to host this tournament thank you. Be prepared for more. This week I’m affiliating our club with USCF and will be TD’ing rated games soon.
I’m pretty sure WinTD offers a post-event ratings estimate, though I’m not sure how well it handles an event with all unrated players. It’s not official, of course, but it might spur some interest among the participants in rated events.
Funny you mention it. I actually was just playing with WinTD to figure out exactly that. I figure out how to make the file to send to USCF for the ratings report, but don’t know how to see what the ratings would be.
It asks for an average rating for previously unrated players, which would (for compatibility with US Chess practice) be 50 x what you figure to be the average age. It will generally produce ratings which are +/- 50 of the US Chess ratings (which have information on the actual age of most of the players).
You had enough clocks for all the games? Aw, shucks, that means you avoided the fun of slapping clocks onto late-running games that started without clocks.
I appreciate the Age x 50 guideline. I entered this in as a Local Rating to assist in the first round pairings.
How do you do the post-tournament ratings estimate?
Bill,
Yup, I missed out on all of the fun…and I’m totally fine with that. Actually, we were fortunate that our district’s Director of Advanced Academics purchased 20 of the basic Leap clocks for us to use. We distributed those to the other district schools after the tournament. But we identified a total of 34 clocks now in the district that we can use for future events.
And yes…we are planning future events. In fact, I talked to Susan Kantor this morning and have filled out our affiliate registration for my club. So, more questions are undoubtedly to follow in this forum.
That shouldn’t matter. You just need to have all paired rounds with results. If there’s a complaint, it’s about a game without a result entered (presumably in the last round paired).
Maybe it should work it that way, but it doesn’t. None of my three sections will show the updated computed ratings if the last round is not marked “final round.”
I actually did print out the original results of the last round, delete the games, re-pair (this time clicking "final round), and reenter the game results. Only then did the computed ratings show in the reports.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not complaining. It was my fault because I didn’t know to click on the “final round” button when I paired the rounds. I was just wondering if there is a edit option for the Pairing like there are ways to change colors after a game has been played or any other edit options that WinTD has available.
Did you require all entries to be in advance? That will be even more important with a rated tournament.
One of the difficulties with a rated event that you won’t see in an unrated event is checking/updating US Chess memberships. Having advance entries only makes the first round pairings smoother, and allows the creation of a list or advance emails to address membership issues. Online chess registration websites like kingregistration, reg4chess and many others can deliver WInTD or SwissSys compatible entries, and simplify your registration work.
Your next event may not be large enough, but one of the things we encourage organizers of large events to do is to do a test upload/verification of their event to check on ID and membership issues, possibly during the first round.
That quite literally cannot be the problem. (The “final round” check box only affects pairings and only under certain (non-standard) options). I suspect that you had an open result, and re-pairing and re-entering the results was a complicated way to fix that.
I encouraged through pricing advance registration, but I did take a couple of registrations at the door of the tournament.
Your advice is valid even for unrated tournaments. I had my tournament already built into WinTD the evening before the tournament and entered in all pre-registered players which greatly sped up the check-in and first-round pairing process. I saved the tournament also as a Test Tournament in which I paired and entered in mock games for the first two rounds to make sure that all my settings were correct.
This meant all I had to do was “check-in” my players on WinTD, enter in my couple of late registrants and pair my rounds. Worked well. I definitely will do this next year when I offer this tournament as a rated event.
I took the time to go back over the game entries for each round/section. All were complete. I must have erred in setting up something else in the tournament.
According to the economists, higher pricing for late registrations may actually encourage late registrations. (See the book ‘Freakonomics’ for examples.)
I think natural procrastination may have more to do with this. Although true in general, chess players seem to be the worst at waiting until the last minute to register. The last day of each pricing cutoff always gets the most registrations.