How much space should one allow? I seem to recall that 20 sq feet is the amount recommended. Also what is the best table size?
20 sq ft per person. 6’ long x 30" wide tables are common tables that you will find in a hotel and work very nicely.
I detest when they put together 2 18" tables (the skinny ones) to ‘make 1 bigger table’. There is usually a bump where the tables come together.
There’s great information on site layout in the fourth edition of the USCF rules, if you can find a copy.
Agree with Sevan. 3 feet is a good side-to-side allocation per board.
Also, you should have at least 4.5 feet (preferably 5 feet) back-to-back between rows, so that, even if the back of each chair is 2 feet away from the table, there will still be room between rows for players to squeeze through on their way to the washrooms.
Arrangement is important, too. If the room is longer than it is wide, tables should be oriented the short way rather than the long way. In other words, an arrangement with many short rows is preferable to one with a few long rows, so that all boards are close to an aisle.
Bill Smythe
20-24 square feet per player is a good number. 25+ is, IMO, “luxurious”.
For the sake of completeness, you can get by with less square footage per player if it is a scholastic/youth event.
Here are a few things that have served me well when laying out playing areas. When you calculate available square footage, be sure to take a look at the room layout. If you plan on having water stations, demo boards, reserved areas for top board(s), etc., take the square footage used for those into accounts. Also, the orientation of your playing hall is important. What’s around you at the playing site? Try to avoid putting boards near walls that border high-volume or high-traffic areas, if you can. Of course, this planning will cut into your total square footage as well.
You mean, you’ll have a choice? 
I prefer 8’ by 30" tables. You can put either 2 or 3 games at a table that way. 6’ x 30" tables basically limit you to two games a table, but they aren’t bad either.
Sometimes, you might exhaust a supply of single 30" tables, and then a site will give you two 8’ x 18" tables pressed together to make a single 36" deep table. What you have to watch out for with these are table tops that are not level across the middle. Avoid them if you can - but at a bigger event, sometimes you might not have a choice.
It’s a very good idea to find out well in advance how many (and what dimension of) tables your site has available for your event. Might avoid some nasty surprises come tournament day.
Pages 180 through 186 of the 4th edition of the Official Rules of Chess contain very helpful information about tournament room setup. In the hope this is covered by fair use, here is the text of that section.
This is contained in Chapter 5, The Well-Run Tournament. I think it is unfortunate that this chapter and Chapter 6 (Tournament Directors’ Checklists) were dropped from the fifth edition of the rule book. While some of the items in the checklists could stand updating in view of computer generated and printed pairings and wall charts, the information in those two chapters still seems to be quite valuable indeed.
So why didn’t the include that helpful information in the fifth edition?
Size of the book. Everyone has their own sections they just “know” belong in the rulebook. If they all got included the book would be even bigger and more unmanageable than it is now. The current thinking from USCF is to split the rulebook into different focused volumes that can be purchased (posted on-line?) or bought as a set. One such volume could include this kind of material.
Probably a good idea. But what’s wrong with having a rule book as big as the Yellow Pages? :mrgreen:
Then it wouldn’t be able to fit in my pocket.
In my opinion, a huge, but occasionally overlooked factor, is that there must be somewhere to go when people are not playing Chess. The rulebook referred to a “skittles room”, as a place for people to play non-tournament Chess, and that’s wonderful, but the excerpt referred to a room big enough for 15% of the people. In my opinion, that room, or other available rooms, must be big enough for 100% of the people, 15% of whom are playing Chess.
In fact, it has to be somewhat bigger than that, because some of your players will be children. Their parents have to be somewhere.
I don’t mean to understate the importance of a good skittles area. But for many tournaments, the organizer/director usually has to balance a number of factors - including venue cost. If getting a large skittles area is too costly, then it is often one of the things that will be sacrificed. As a result, typically the size of a skittles area depends on the anticipated size of, site for, and intended audience for the tournament.
Two extreme examples: at, say, a state scholastic championship, you need skittles areas that, combined, are at least equal to to the playing area in size. At the US Senior Open, on the other hand, a skittles area that is maybe 30-40% of the playing area should be fine - and if your site has plenty of open seating, you might not need a formal skittles area at all. Also, in a small local event, the site you’re using might not even have a skittles area - so players might have to either adapt to whatever public area is available, or just do without.
At small, local, events an actual skittles area may be impossible to accomodate. However, the people still have to go someplace when they aren’t playing Chess. I’ve seen events where there really was only one room, so that everyone, including parents, is stuck in a room where everyone is supposed to be quiet, for hours. It can be quite unpleasant.
Sadly, finding an appropriate venue is the hardest part of putting on a Chess tournament, and compromises inevitably have to be made. Budgets usually preclude perfect locations. I’m simply saying that if someone is getting ready to host a tournament for the first time, the organizer has to look at more than just the playing area when considering a potential site. He has to remember that people don’t vanish during the times when their games are not in progress.
My understanding is that those guidelines were written with hotel tournaments in mind. When you think of it that way, a skittles room with 15 percent of the capacity of all tournament rooms combined seems fairly typical. For a one-day tournament, though, I’d say the skittles space should have between 75 and 150 percent of the capacity of the tournament floor.
If you know you are going to have to use the 2 “skinny” [i.e. 18 inch] tables, then have them duck taped together to minimize the bump between tables. I saw this done once many years ago during a major tournament in the Chicago area. It did not eliminate the bump between tables, but it did reduce it significantly.
-Larry S. Cohen