Hello everyone, I am a new TD and was wanting to run a very small rated event just to get practice with the reporting scores and the general setup of a 4 player round robin event. I see how to report scores and know all of the rules of chess in terms of tournament play but the administrative work is new to me. Do I have to get a rated event approved before I can host an event? How would I handle the event (in terms of reporting) if all of the players were unrated but have a USCF membership? Will they still get a rating of some sort even if everyone is unrated? Any information would be helpful.
Mr. Miley,
You need the approval of an affiliate to run a tournament. Do you have access to an affiliate?
Alex Relyea
Yep, I have an affiliate. Do they need to submit anything for approval before there can be a rated event?
So all that has to happen is for the Affiliate to list you as an authorized TD. There is no such thing as a player without a rating, but players who have never played a rated game have their ratings based on age. This helps to initialize the new ratings for new players, so your quad will be fine. Please note, however, that the players will not be able to have published ratings (they’ll be officially unrated) because they have not played four games.
Mike Nolan would have the exact numbers, but I’d bet that fewer than 20% of tournaments give US Chess any advance notice at all.
Alex Relyea
Awesome, thank you for the help!
It’s probably more like 25%, but most events received by US Chess are not ones we knew were being held. FIDE has different rules, of course, you cannot hold a FIDE rated event unless you register it in advance, among other things.
I’d suggest you go to the TD information page, there’s a lot of links there to help you get started, but posting in the Forums is also a great way to learn. And if you can find an event being held in your area, you might try contacting the organizer and seeing if they can use some additional help on their TD staff, learning by observing and working under the tutelage of a more experienced TD is highly advisable.
See uschess.org/content/blogcategory/342/668/
Although you can send rating reports to the office by mail, that’s more expensive than submitting them online, for that you will need to register for access to the TD/Affiliate Support Area. (So will the affiliate, which has to authorize you to submit events online using their affiliate ID.)
I sort of disagree with Alex on whether there are players without a rating. For the purposes of your tournament, yes, there are players without a rating. That may affect how (or if) you pair them and what prizes they can earn. However, the first step we go through when starting to rate an event is to determine a starting rating for any players that don’t have any previous rated games. If we have no other information to work with, we will use the player’s age, if we know it. (By training I’m an engineer, and we call this a WAG - a Wild ***** Guess.)
WAG I will have to remember. If anyone is still reading this, I was wondering about small tournaments that happen weekly. In many of these small tournaments wouldn’t it work out that many people are playing the same people each week? Is this acceptable as long as it is a small weekly event like this? I thought I had seen something about the rating difference can not be more than 400 or so but that was about matches between two people who wanted the game to count towards a rating.
By “small tournaments that happen weekly”, do you mean a single tournament with 1 round per week (e.g. round 1 on Monday March 18, round 2 on Monday March 25, etc), or do you mean an entire tournament on a single weeknight (say, 4 rounds at G/20 or something like that)?
I hope you mean the latter, because although the former was popular once upon a time, nowadays most people prefer the latter, so that they can play faster and get more games in.
In any case, the latter presents no problem at all for U.S. Chess. Repeat pairings within one tournament can be a sticky wicket, but to play the same opponent again in another tournament is just fine.
And who knows, maybe the idea will grow and you’ll get more players for your second tournament than you did for your first, and there will be fewer repeat pairings anyway.
Bill Smythe
I have wondered about how many of the tournament submitted were
advertised on TLA. 25%? Would have thought a lot higher.
Rob Jones
It’s not best to have an isolated group, but it is perfectly legal. Ideally, some of you should go outside and play other people. A group of four playing, say, 100 games only against each other is bound to create inaccurate ratings.
Alex Relyea
Small relatively isolated pools of players who mostly just play each other happen, the ratings may not be very accurate for games against players outside that small pool but they will usually be fairly accurate within the pool.
The match rules are there to help protect the ratings system. If player A only plays player B, that rating won’t be very helpful in predicting games against other players.