A player contacted me by text to sign up for a tournament. he si he pwanted to play in the tournament. I aked for his name and USCF ID#. He asked how he got a USCF ID#, I told him to go to our club web site for instructions. He texts me back later with his name and ID. I can’t find that ID on the USCF site. So I wait a day. but still no joy. I message back and ask him for his last name 9he only gave me his first). He gives it to me. I find one person with that name and a slightly different number.
I text him, yes that is his name. I sign him up, tournament day comes, he shows he plays (some of my questions are answered about our interactions when I find out he is 14 years old). I upload the tournament to USCF. The chart in the tournament report says that he is not a current member.
What he said in his texts led me to believe he was signing up at that time. So I don’t know If its some kind of fubar between him and that USCF or what. I contact him, he says he will look into it. Next day he texts me “do I have to pay to be a member?”
I tell him yes, I mean that a dumb question coming from a 14 year old. So its been a week, nothing, I text him and he says his dad will get it fixed next week.
That sounds by now like the proverbial “the ceck is in the mail”.
questions.
How long before i get into trouble with the USCF about the delay?
As far as the first question goes, it is supposed to be submitted within a week. Uploaded is not the same as submitted, so you are already at the edge.
As far as the second question goes, all games paired in the section must be rated. He needs a membership. Removing players’ games just because one of the participants ended up not being a member is a serious offense.
In the future make sure to check that a player actually is a member. One feature (I use that term somewhat disparagingly) of the website is that the ID number is a key and is created before any payment is made. Then when a payment is made an expiration date shows up. Unfortunately many players or parents think they are done once they see the ID number and there are a lot of IDs that were never members but that the players think are good.
The $20 option would be appropriate for that if the father doesn’t take care of it (let the father know that his delay is preventing EVERY player from getting their games rated). The $10 TD error is something that I felt justified to use recently when the player search showed a 3/31/2023 expiration date for a 3/18/2023 tournament (Illinois 2023-03-31) but the validation report said the player is not a member and you can only see it if you go into the MSA record, inconvenient for checking each player using a slow WiFi during an on-site registration crush shortly before a round: (Expiration Dt. 2023-03-31 Not a US Chess Member). I had never before seen a non-member with an expiration date (with the exception of a magazine only non-playing membership years ago that is probably no longer being offered).
One advantage of the $10 option is that it does not give a free membership to a player that is intentionally deceptive.
I found out after my tournament was over that one of the players isn’t a US Chess member even though he told me he was a member. What do I do?
First, is important to remind TDs that ALL RATABLE GAMES in a rated section must be submitted for rating. You can’t pick and choose which games get rated for any reason, including membership status. If a player plays a ratable game in a rated section, that game MUST BE RATED. And that mean you need to deal with this non-member in order to include those games in the rating report.
For situations where the TD discovers after the tournament ends that someone is a non-member, there is a $10 correction fee option.
-------updated------
Guess I should have refreshed my browser because Jeff #1 answered before I did.
That is an ID number assigned prior to payment. Not even the $10 correction option will work because it was never assigned a member type, and thus is an invalid member type.
Its just disapointing to find out that the one option I am left with is rewarding the the kid that screwed me over. Time for me to rethink how much I realy need the USCF in my life.
i click the $20 button, I save, I vallidate, errors again.
The emails with the errors sends my to a page on how to fix the error, I get this;
Pairing # NNN non-member ID
Check the US Chess member ID for this pairing #. It may be an incorrect ID or there may be a membership issue with this ID.
At this point you have done what you can to get the tournament rated.
Follow up on Monday with Korey and Joshua. The only thing available is patience and any rating delay is out of your control.
I don’t know of anyone who has ever ‘gotten in trouble with the national office’ for submitting an event later than 7 days after it ended. I know of a few who have had players file complaints about non-submission.
As to whether you can just drop a non-member from the event, that is expressly prohibited. ALL ratable games in a section have to be rated. (IMHO looking through crosstables that seem to have some holes in them, I suspect it happens, but it shouldn’t.)
If you aren’t getting a response after several working days (ie, NOT weekends or holidays), I’d suggest contacting a more senior staff member, Boyd Reed, Dan Lucas, or Carol Meyer.
As to the underlying cause, IDs can be created by CIVI-CRM that aren’t current members and don’t have any membership type at all, I think they kind of fall through the cracks after that. I’ve modified the tournament validation program to treat these as lapsed non-member (X) records if the ID starts with a ‘3’, meaning it came from CIVI-CRM, which should make this easier to deal with. I will note this as an issue that needs to be resolved when they rewrite the ratings code.
You should now be able to resolve this with a $10 correction fee, but you might want to contact the individual to encourage that person to buy a membership.
Many aspects of tournament play are bewildering and sometimes frightening to new players, and our rules on membership requirements are not always straight forward. A player might be involved in JTP events at school which do not require memberships, but then want to play in a non-school event that does. (And most of us have seen players who show up saying they’re unrated, because they didn’t realize that the events they played in at school were JTP events that had been rated; in some cases I"m not sure they were even told the events would be rated.)
I think it is part of our responsibility as organizers and TDs to help new players (and in many cases their parents) learn the ropes at tournaments, both the formal rules and the informal ones regarding conduct and fair play.
I’m getting in late on this thread, but I’ll add a few comments.
I first encountered this problem at a tournament I ran in September of 2020. A young man came to our tournament and said that he had put in his membership online. It was my first experience dealing with a membership that had been put in using the new system, and I assumed that since he had been assigned a user ID#, his membership must be active, but this was not the case. One of the features of the new system is that it assigns a member a USCD ID# before payment has been made, but doesn’t activate it until the payment issue is resolved. And the initial screen doesn’t flag the membership as never having been activated, except for the lack of an expiration date.
Note that, even today, the lack of an expiration date doesn’t necessarily mean that a membership has never been activated. It can also, occasionally, mean that the membership was activated, but expired a long, long time ago (I can give some examples of this if somebody wants). The important thing, though, is that if no expiration date is listed, the player doesn’t currently have an active membership.
One of the things I am not fond of in the new membership system is that it does not assign a membership type, expiration date or status value to someone who has not yet paid dues.
These non-member records, which may be there as contact records for other purposes, were sort of falling through the cracks during tournament validation. We’ve now changed the validation program so that it treats those records as lapsed non-members (type X), but it is still up to the TD to turn them into current members unless one of the non-member exceptions applies.
And I had a case where it looked like the $10 TD error fee had been applied to a mid-March event and it gave an expiration date at the end of March while still showing a non-member error for an event I ran a week later in March. There was a week left in March when I moved further from the player search page (showing the 3/31/2023 expiration) to the link to the actual MSA page, and on the MSA page it showed a 3/31/2023 expiration and a flag as a non-member. Feeling blindsided I decided to justifiably use the $10 TD error fee instead of buying a membership.
On 3/24/2023 the error report said 2023-03-31 Not a current member type
Considering the sometimes slow wi-fi speed at many events it could be a tournament-delaying burden to have to go into each and every on-site entry during on-site registration and if you pair somebody for round one planning to do that review once the tournament is started then you risk that the player (or parent) will decline to pay for a membership at that time and a rated game has already been paid.
