I’m fairly new to the TD world.
I ran a Quick tournament last night and had someone who wasn’t a USCF member, but played FIDE in Europe a few years ago. I went ahead and used her estimated FIDE rating.
She didn’t want to renew that night, and I’m pretty sure that you can send $.50 per game for non-members.
Is that the correct procedure, or do I need to buy her a membership?
There is no “tournament membership” any more. In theory, the USCF should send you a bill for $2/game for any non-members, but they haven’t been doing so recently. If the player shows up again, you ought to collect a membership. Incidentally, FIDE ratings should be adjusted up by 50 or 100 points (28D1), though if it’s a small tournament the question isn’t very important.
That’s very bad advice you have just been given.
As a TD, you are REQUIRED to know the proper procedures for running a ratable event, it doesn’t appear that you do.
If non-members show up you MUST collect dues from them!
That the USCF hasn’t been rigorously enforcing that requirement (both because of an inability to do so and because of the complaints the so-called ‘Traci letters’ produced) doesn’t mean the requirement doesn’t exist. Our new rating programming will be able to enforce the membership requirement BEFORE an event can be rated, TD’s had better get used to abiding by it again.
Personally, I would prefer the USCF reinstitute a per game fee for non-members ($5 per game sounds about right to me), but since Bill Goichberg was one of the primary forces behind the demise of the old ‘length of tournament’ membership in around 1990, I don’t know if such a motion would be approved by either the Delegates or the Executive Board.
I didn’t advise him not to collect memberships; I told him that he should. I also stated – correctly – that the USCF had not been enforcing this rule lately. If you don’t like it, take it up with Bill Goichberg, not with me. Your apparent implication that this should be kept secret is pretty offensive.
Actually, I’ve been proposing the reinstitution of the ‘length of tournament’ membership’ for quite a few years.
I think the current procedure, where those who are ‘in the know’ get away with including nonmembers, with or without paying the $2 (probably mostly without) is intolerable.
And I’ve been in contact with Bill Goichberg on this, I think he’s willing to consider reinstituting a $5/game ‘tournament membership’.
The ‘member’ would probably get one issue of the magazine for each
$5 paid in ‘tournament’ dues.
Mike,
I like the reinstitution of the per game tournament dues for NEW players, on a one time basis, as a promo introduction. I think $2 per game is more reasonable, however. I think I understand part of the reasoning for the $5 fee; that being to reduce the number of instances where a player would take advantage of paying only $8/4-rd tournament, and also, I suppose, to cover the cost of CL. I suppose many players who play only a few tournaments per year would take this option, if the fee was just $2/game, and USCF would suffer on lack of membership funds. So, why not make it applicable to NEW players only, on a one (or possibly two) time basis.
I do not like the idea of (say 4) free magaizines for these players. If a player plays in 4 rated games, at a cost of $20 (in your suggestion), you are saying he would get 4 magazines? Maybe give him 2 magazines, and that would be pushing it, in my opinion.
What’s the bookstore shelf cost of CL these days?
-Terry
I recently encountered a new membership verification problem. A player entering a tournament had joined USCF on-line. USCF discovered the credit card was invalid. USCF contacted the player via e-mail and the player presented a copy at registration. USCF told the player they would contact them with in five days. In this particular case, the problem was apparently resolved since the player now appears in the database as a valid member.
A problem would arise if the player did not resolve their credit card problem. Would USCF absorb the cost of the “invalid membership” or would they look to the tournament director or organizer?
This is a problem caused by the current (braindead) Mindspring-based webstore, which doesn’t actually process the order or even check that the credit card is valid, it just e-mails the information to the USCF.
Between 80% and 90% of the membership orders received from the webstore are processed within a few minutes. All non-membership orders (including Affiliate renewals and tournament registrations), and the unprocessable membership orders have to be referred to the office staff to be charged and entered manually.
Tournament registrations are still being sent to the NY office. We received around 1000 Supernationals registrations from the webstore in the last week before the early entry deadline.
All of the membership orders that cannot be processed are sent to the TN office, where the goal is to have them all processed within 2 working days.
However, not all membership orders can be completed. (For example, if the credit card is bad and the cardholder cannot be reached.)
Once I get a chance to finish the new webstore, all webstore orders will be confirmed and processed (or rejected) in realtime, so that there will be no ambiguity as to whether the order has been processed or not.
This is being linked to a new national events website, so that tournament registrations sent through the new webstore should be up on the advance entry list within a few hours, just like memberships are posted to MSA. Correspondence entries will be e-mailed to Alex Dunne for section assignment.
Why give a magazine at all? Consider the $5 a rating fee or whatever amount is decided upon.
Also, I must confess that in December I encountered a few people who got in without having memberships at a tournament I directed. It was a big tournament with over 200 players (which since it was a scholastic tournament it had many new members), but I still am not sure how they got past the volunteers who were making sure everyone had a membership. Must have slipped through the cracks somehow. So in my case it wasn’t intentional.
I found many people actually had memberships, but somehow thier names were mispelled in the membership database on MSA. It took me weeks to search and search to find many of them. I tried all kinds of spellings and found most, but about 2 or 3 were not found so I assume they weren’t members.
By the way, what is the process of correcting name mispellings or other membership information that is bad? 
Thanks.
I was at a delegates meeting one year where reinstituting the $2 per game was on the advanced agenda. The delegate was persuaded to withdraw his motion because the delegates were told that the motion was not needed because it was current office policy.
Luis Salinas
Minor spelling changes can be made using the “Correct a Spelling Error in a Member’s Name” link, which is on the membership batch page of TD/A.
We still need a way for TDs to submit changes without there being an associated dues transaction, but there are some issues that need to be resolved first, and it isn’t a very high priority task.
If your event is more than one day long and/or you have sufficient staff and net access from the site, you can try what some other TDs have done:
Create ratings files after the end of the 1st round, upload them, and use the validation report to check on any membership issues. That way you can work on resolving those membership issues while the event is still under way. (Delete the partially completed event afterwards so it doesn’t clutter up your pending events list.)
That’s what I’ll be doing as part of the backroom staff at SuperNationals III next month. My first goal is to have all membership issues identified on Friday so that they can be resolved before the event ends. My second goal is to have the rating report ready for submission on Monday. I think it would be really great if we could have the event RATED before many of the players have gotten back to their homes.
Luis, I’ve lost track of the number of motions that were withdrawn under similar circumstances. Some were micromanagement, for sure, but others were good ideas that the office just didn’t want forced upon them if they didn’t come up with the idea in the first place.
Grant Perks and I have been working on trying to come up with a consistent policy for a number of issues that the new ratings system has brought to everyone’s attention. Consistent enforcement of the USCF’s membership policy (Rule 23C) is one of them, but we have received quite a few events in the mail that had lapsed or uncertified TDs or lapsed affiliates, and some with no TD or affiliate identified on the form at all.
The $2/game fee hasn’t ever been stated as an official USCF policy that I can find, and it has been inconsistently applied, at best. (One organizer was told to stop advertising it as an option on tournament flyers.)
$2 per game is ridiculously cheap for the privilege to play in a nationally sanctioned tournament, Expecially considering inflation (that’s what it was 20 years for goodness sake…)
$5 per game sounds right; one issue of the magazine; and then a followup “bill” in a month or two to pay the difference (plus $5) to become a full member.
$2 would be OK if it’s a scholastic member that we may or may not ever see again (no magazine).
And whatever happened to “it’s not hard, carry your card”? 
I have a membership form from around 1990. Adult dues were $25 at the time. A ‘tournament membership’ was $1 per game for adults, $1 per two games for 19 and under.
I think the tournament membership option was discontinued in 1991 or 1992, along with the ‘participating youth’ (non-magazine) membership, which was $3.50 per year.
Since adult dues are now $49, $2 per game is proportional to the rate back then.
Personally, I think $3 per game, without any copies of Chess Life, would make other membership options more attractive. But if we’re going to officially sanction that again, then we will need to be less tolerant about non-members in general.
With online databases and computers, plus kids who never keep track of things like membership cards, “Carry your card” is anachronistic.