As many of you are aware, I am tutoring chess at a residential facility for high-school age juveniles who have severe substance use disorders. Most of my students learned to play chess at our site. We have run five in-house, Swiss system tournaments per year for the past 2.5 years. Recent tournaments have involved about 25 (male and female) players each.
We are exploring the possibility of having chess competitions against other specialized facilities who serve at-risk youth. Our hope is to start experimentally with one event against a nearby residential school.
Specific concerns that have occurred to me are as follows:
–if we use a standard format of, say, seven players per team, there is a concern about how to constructively occupy players who finish their games early. Some students with time on their hands can become difficult to manage.
–most of the games played at our site are completed within about 20 minutes. This seems like a short time for a competition to last. Perhaps each pair of players could play two games, with alternate colors?
–I am assuming that we will not be able to use chess clocks, mainly because right now we only have access to one of them (mine).
I would be most grateful for any and all suggestions as to how this event could be best structured and run.
That’s an interesting and challenging project, and I’ll supply some random thoughts to you.
–Yes, having each pairing play two games (switching colors for game 2) is an excellent idea. It’s not worth the logistics for just one game of chess.
–Teach them chess notation and their games will slow way down. ;-p
–Figure out how much chess-playing time you want and work backward from that. It would be possible to do a small Swiss where you limit players from the same team meeting each other in the first two rounds. (I am assuming you are not rating this. Don’t do that if you are rating this event.) If you do a Swiss, you can re-pair ASAP and get them back playing pretty quickly.
–Set up a rolling blitz tournament in which players participate as soon as they’re done with their official games. All you have to do is take whatever players are available, and pair based on score. For the first round, use the score from the player’s match game for pairing. After that, use their blitz score for pairing. Keep repairing players as they finish their games.
–I don’t know where you are, but if you can get an expert or a master in, it would be possible to either do a simul or lessons or a lecture with the players who are done playing.
–If both residential facilities have computer access, doing the matches online would also be a possibility
Do you work at the residential facility? Assuming you do not, talk to the people who work there with the young people and find out how free time is usually structured and supervised.
It’s a challenge to take any group of young people on the road for an event; more so with this group. What you can do solo when you’re on-site will require more chaperones when you take your team on the road.
I would do two games with switching colors and the second starting as soon as the first is done.
The idea of a series of blitz games after the players end their two games works fine. I have used that before. Those can be a formal as you wish.
For this sort of thing you can download a timer app for a phone and use that. It is not a pure “chess clock” but who cares? You aren’t going to be worrying about kids using a chess app on that phone as it will be in front of everyone and the stakes are very low. And you can still rate it using those sorts of clocks if you wish to do so.
As long as the kids are still school age of any sort an affiliate could get the voucher memberships and apply them to these kids to get inexpensive memberships, if that is your goal.