I think it be a benefit for the USCF tournament players if some more information were available online. Here are some concrete suggestions:
I would like to see us encourage more organizers to provide on-line listings for their tournaments. To this end I suggest that we increase rating fees by $2.00 per tournament and combine this with a $2.00 DISCOUNT for any tournament that has an on-line (searchable) TLA. The discount would only apply if the tournament results were submitted in a timely manner.
I’d like to see the how the organizer and TD perform their functions. The USCF could easily compile a statistic for average length of time between tournament conclusion and when the rating report is received. I’d also like to see how close the organizer tends to come to his “based-on” attendance. Are there any other objective measures of TD and/or organizer performance?
I’d also like to see a “user satisfaction” rating for organizers and TDs. Let any USCF member give a positive or negative rating for any events they’ve played in.
I’m afraid, however, that this will tend to show people in a very negative light (I’m aftraid that many people won’t bother providing a rating unless they have some complaint and I’m afraid that any petty complaint will get magnified out of proportion to the real problem).
Because of these concerns, I DON’T suggest a numerical rating (1-10 or anything like that). I think by having simply a positive or negative rating (like on ebay) we’ll eliminate the vast majority of petty complaints and only see the most serious problems reported. Perhaps we should only allow one rating from each USCF member for any organizer or TD. Any further rating for that organizer or TD by the same member would replace his previous rating. We could compile a simple statistic of what percentage of results were positive, or maybe we should look at the ratio of complaints per rated game. Since this is a very subjective item, I recognize that we need to think about this very carefully and implement it with some caution.
For all tournaments that are listed on-line, the information from #2 and #3 can be automatically included in the listing.
The free TLA’s are not designed for the small tournaments, or the local chess tournaments. Looked over the online TLA’s, and rejected to make any postings. All that I need is to post the site, the date, time for on-site registration, the round time, time control, and the prize.
Second, michess.org has a better tournament web-site than the USCF. Working with the set frame, deal with some HTML and links you can make a great information base.
Third, not all tournaments need a TLA. Why does a club that has a month long swiss need to post a TLA? Or in that fact have a public web-site statement?
So why are you asking for a two dollar fee when the TLA was not important to the organizers in the first place?
I do not recall anyone appointing you as the expert to decide and tell what the online listings are for and are not for.
I am certainly glad to see that Michigan has happily taken responsibility to list all the tournaments in this country better than any stinkin’ national group like the USCF can.
Is it true that Michigan is now requiring all chess players to use the MonRoi system in ALL their chess games from tournaments to casual games to club events to correspondence chess?
I think it would be a benefit to have tournaments listed. We’ve gone over these reasons before, and you can look up the previous threads if you like.
We need to get more of the tournaments into the searchable listing – this is one way. BTW I think another way would be player generated pressure. Start asking your local TD/organizer why they haven’t listed their tournaments online. Maybe EVERYONE should ask the CCA and other big organizers why THEIR tournaments aren’t being listed!
Also BTW, this weekend will be the second tournament in a row that I’ve attended that has an on-line TLA! If we could only get get the national events listed and the big tournaments…
Really, I thought the bigger objections would be to #3.
I wonder how many people would see $2 as enough of an incentive, especially if it’s a back-handed one? (Raising fees $2 for events that don’t have an online TLA.)
I don’t know why the CCA hasn’t put up online TLAs for its upcoming events. Maybe Bill is waiting for the USCF office to get caught up on TLAs that are going in Chess Life, since most of those events are Grand Prix events and have TLAs in the magazine?
Dan Lucas and I are still trying to figure out how to handle changing over from the current TLA entry program to the new online form so that we have both print and online TLAs from the same data.
I set Diane Reese up with access to enter TLAs for the upcoming national events, but I don’t know if she’s done anything about them yet.
I suggested some kind of a ‘promptness’ rating for TDs and organizers a few weeks ago, it didn’t get much of a response. If an event is reported late, it may not be the organizer’s fault, or it may not be the TD’s fault, especially a ‘TD for hire’, so how wo we figure out who gets the credit/blame?
I think you’re probably right that a feedback system would result in mostly negative feedback.
However, one of the things I’ve thought about is some mechanism for players (or prospective players) to be able to contact TDs but without publishing the TD’s e-mail address. We get several error reports every week for events where the player has no easy way to contact the TD. (This is especially true for wrong ID situations in which the player has never been at one of that TD’s events.)
I just did a list for events received in 2006 and, oddly enough, I found four events which were initially entered before their end date.
I’m not sure if that’s because the TD uploaded a partial crosstable during the event and then finished it online or if there is some other explanation.
I don’t think you need to figure out fault. Once the organizer & TD have several events averaged together it’ll be obvious if one or the other is constantly late. Even if it were clearly the TD’s fault in each case, wouldn’t the organizer deserve some of the fault (for using a TD that is now known to report late)? Just report the average and see if public opinion is enough to start correcting results. You’ll get the biggest impact if these average times are reported automatically in the on-line TLA. That way, when I’m deciding which tournament to go to, I might skip the one with the organizer that always takes 10 weeks to get a tournament reported and go to the one that always reports on-line the next day.
The more I think about the feedback idea, the more I think it needs to be scaled by the number of games that TD and/or organizer has had rated. Report it as a percentage (hopefully less than 1% negative) or problems reported per 1000 games or something like that. I get the feeling that the number of complaints will be relatively small and that way we won’t sound too negative.
Having a separate system for rating TDs and organizers isn’t as good an idea IMHO. Put the info right in the TLA – let it affect tournament turn-out and some TDs will get a lot more prompt. If they don’t then I see people starting to play more tournaments with the “prompt” TDs. Which will have the same net effect: fewer rated games will be reported late and more will be reported on-time.
Does that include events that were filled in online? If so, I’m responsible for two of them. I had a small round robin and a match that I built the rating reports for online, and I just put the results in as the games finished. That worked well for me.
Actually, that’s EXACTLY the kind of tournaments they were designed for!
Look at it this way, Doug. It cost you nothing except a few minutes worth of your time. It doesn’t require six weeks or more of lead time, you can put up a TLA on Thursday for a tournament being held on Saturday.
If it brings even ONE player to your event, isn’t that worth a few minutes of your time?
I did some checking on TDs and how quickly they submit their events.
There are 8 TDs who have submitted 50 or more events since 9/1/2005.
Three of them have averaged less than one day between the event ending date and the date received: Steve Immitt, Doug Forsythe, and Luis Salinas.
Steve wins the fastest TD award, I had to go all the way back to September to find an event of his which was NOT received the same day it ended.