I think the legal argument is baseless, but I’m sure there are plenty of lawyers here willing to weigh in on it. Note that the USCF cannot force any organizer to pay out the prizes. All it can do is deny an organizer access to USCF services in the future if he fails to do so. This works because a) the organizers need the USCF’s services for a tournament to succeed, and b) the players trust the USCF to enforce the rules. If the USCF starts granting waivers without adequate justification, there’s going to be a problem with “b.”
The sad thing is also that the 6th round is pretty much over and there are no pairings, no standings, no players list available. There’s no broadcast on MonRoi or on ICC.
Not sure what the organizers are attempting to accomplish by keeping everyone in the dark.
Sevan, would you care to guess how many tournaments are held each year (you can limit that to Grand Prix events) and how many of those post pairings or standings online during the event?
Sevan,
To be fair you might want to limit your answer to those super prize fund/ super swisses.
Why guess when you can tell me?
Why don’t we look at the tournaments that are $100k or higher. Let’s see which tournaments do we have - National Open, Chicago Open, Foxwoods, World Open, and North American Open? Did I miss one or add one in that I shouldn’t have? These do update their standings and pairings during the event. Heck they have games relayed online as well.
Kinda stinks for a sponsor of the event like MonRoi who has great technology for relaying games online but I don’t see any games relayed.
Want to play with the big boys but when things go awry they want exemptions to rules, they don’t want to let people know what’s going on during the tournament, etc?
The first part was a trick question, I posted those totals for the last 3 1/2 years a couple of days ago broken out by GP points awarded. 
As to the other part, I honestly don’t know how many tournaments keep standing and pairings up-to-date during their events. My suggestion that this was something the USCF could incorporate into an update MSA page was not widely supported here, and at this point that is not something we are actively contemplating.
The Delegates were given a chance to revise the guarantee/based on rules for large events a few years ago, the motion failed. Perhaps the Delegates thought that some day the shoe might be on the other foot–theirs.
I do. Goichberg does for some tournaments, but not all. The U.S. Open and National Open do, though they are sometimes rather slow. I don’t believe Weikel does. I’m sure there are others, but most tournaments are of local interest only, so there’s no reason I would have heard of them. (How often does a player in Cincinnati want to follow the rounds of a tournament in Denver?) It might be interesting to do a survey of this.
There can be only two reasons why there are no pairings, no standings, and no players list available. One: The organizers have been overwhelmed with hundreds of last minute entrants; or, Two: Because of the lack of turnout the webmaster has been forced to play chess!
baconlog.blogspot.com/
blog.chess.com/nocab
There’s a whiff of the lynch mob or the lemming migration about any overlarge concentration of like-thinking individuals, no matter how virtuous their cause.-P. J. O’Rourke
There are other possible explanations: Lack of on-line access at the site, lack of proper software on the computers available at the site, lack of anyone at the site who knows how to create/post web pages. Of course, none of these would speak well of the organizers.
John, I agree with you fully on one thing here. If an organizer wants to play in the big leagues, he better be prepared to look like a big league player, before, during and after the event.
It used to be that meant having published bulletins during the event (or going full bore and doing a tournament book), but that’s getting to be a bit of an anachronism.
Out of curiosity, other than the two FIDE world championship events, what’s the last chess tournament held in the USA for which there was a tournament book? (I’m guessing it was probably either one of the Piatagorsky Cup or Lone Pine events.)
These days that probably means things like having pairing and results online during the event, having some of the top games viewable online (whether by using Monroi or some other means), having coverage on Chess Life Online, sending out press releases, etc.
San Antonio 1972? Amazon lists a book on Lone Pine 1979 by Murray Chandler, but I’ve never seen it, and 89 pages doesn’t sound like much of a tournament book.
Edit: How high are your standards for “tournament book” – in terms of either “tournament” or “book”? I know of several small, privately produced tournament books/pamphlets for invitational tournaments at the Boylston Club in Boston in the 1970s, and one for an IM norm tournament in LA about five years ago. All worthy endeavors, but classing them with San Antonio 1972 or the Second Piatigorsky Cup doesn’t seem right.
Tournament over, no updates on final standings, all information on website is a couple of days old.
Any one have any idea how many players showed up and who won the sections?
Not sure exactly how many people showed up, but turnout was not large. I’d be surprised if there were more than 230. Robson ended up winning. The tournament was well run at the site. The facility was great, though parking was $10/day with no in-out privileges. As noted here, some online coverage would have been nice.
One of the sponsors (claimed to be the only sponsor) made an announcement before the last round that the organizers intended to pay out 50% of the prize fund and that an avenue of appeal was available through the USCF. He also mentioned that the tournament loses money even paying out only $50,000 in prizes.
To receive a check, you had to sign some acknowledgement agreeing to the 50% payout. If you did not sign, then you have to appeal to Bill Hall and will receive money pending resolution of the appeal. This was inappropriate since players may have felt pressured into signing. My feeling is that all prize winners should be paid the “uncontested” 50% immediately. The other 20% should be paid pending resolution of the appeal.
Maybe they announced at the beginning of the tournament that the prize winners would not get paid unless they agreed to accept what was given.
Be sure to allow sufficient time waiting for a response to your email.
I must say that I was shocked by the Miami Open’s bold prize fund and immediately wondered if it was too good to be true. They based it on 650 players and probably needed 450 to break even. How many USCF rated adult tournaments draw over 400 players? How many of these are neither USCF national events nor CCA events? Off the top of my head, I can’t think of any. (Weikel typically draws in the upper 300s in Reno.)
Suffice it to say, for someone to come on the scene out of nowhere and expect a turnout well in excess of 400 in the second year is quite surprising and quite risky. If Bill Goichberg had chosen to run a big tournament in Miami, he might have drawn 400-500 based on his CCA’s name recognition. The fact that he did not says something about his opinion of the viability of such an event.
By cranken’s estimate of the attendance, the total number of players in 2008 was approximately the same as the number of local players in 2007. In other words, the number of local players went down from 2007 to 2008. This says a lot, since the local folks didn’t have to make travel arrangements that could have been impacted by a hurricane. If the Miami organizers can’t draw from their own base, where presumably they have built a strong reputation over the years, then how could they have expected to draw around the country?
Michael Aigner
Forget online. How about having standings available on the wall of the event while it’s going on? They usually didn’t even have that until pairings for the next round were printed. I think it was Saturday morning that I went down to the tourney hall hoping to check on the results of the Friday night games, and they still had the standings posted from before Friday night’s games were played. That was surprising.
It would have been nice if Monroi was there covering the event. Last year, they were there, and every player in the Open section used a Monroi device to keep score, so the games were all broadcast live on the web automatically. They also had a much easier time projecting the positions from the top boards on the wall using a projector. This year, they had someone running back and forth to the tables and updating the positions manually on the laptop that they had hooked up to a projector. I’ll give them credit for the effort, anyhow, even though they had a hard time keeping up with the players sometimes.
They also moved back the time of the Saturday night round at the last minute, in order to merge the 3 day schedule of non-Open sections into the 4 day schedule one round earlier than originally planned. My best guess for why is that some sections had so few players in the 3 day schedule that it was getting silly to have them play a 5th round against each other before merging.
As for total attendance, I think there were 61 in the Open section and 38 in my section (U1700). There were 5 other sections (U2100, U1900, U1500, U1300, and U1000), and I think they all had at least 30 people, though that might include re-entries, so my guesstimate is that attendance was in the 240-270 range. It was definitely less than the 335 last year, probably in part because of Hurricane Ike and in part because people wised up to the prize fund being advertised way higher than could reasonably be expected.
Overall, I think the event went pretty well on site, except that it would have been nice to have standings posted as soon as all the games for a section were completed. I’ve been to plenty of smaller tournaments that did a better job in that respect. As mentioned by others, the location this year was much nicer than last year, too.
My big question is still the same as last year: Why are they doing this at the height of hurricane season? I really believe that if they move this tournament to the middle of winter, they’ll attract plenty of northerners who want an excuse to come down to Florida to get out of the snow.
–Fromper
2 days after the tournament. Still nothing updated on the website for standings, winners, etc.
No MSA either but last year they took 12 days to submit.
Interesting - the Miami Open shows up on FIDE’s ratings for the next period:
ratings.fide.com/treport.phtml?event16=15615
But not on the MSA.
It does show that FIDE received it on 9-15.
So why isn’t it showing on the MSA or am I missing it?
Probably there’s an issue with one or more memberships, perhaps in the lower sections that are not FIDE rated. In other words, the tournament has probably already been submitted online but cannot be officially rated until all of the issues in all of the sections are resolved (i.e. someone’s money is received). The USCF office, however, wisely took the crosstable for the Open section and submitted it to FIDE just in time for the 9/15 submission deadline for the October list.
Michael Aigner