I helped run the Oregon Open this past weekend, uschess.org/msa/XtblMain.php?202209055782.0. Players were free to play up in any section and a good number of players played up. Some players didn’t like when they were paired against a much lower rated player.
What do you think about allowing players to playing up only one section? This is kind of a compromise between those who like to play up and those who don’t want to be paired against much lower rated players. Also, how would you handle unrated players in this scenario?
Some tournaments have sections that are restricted to certain ranges of rating (rather than the usual “under xxxx”). For example, one of our regular recurring tournaments in Wisconsin typically has a top section that is “Masters and Experts only”. If your rating is under 2000, you simply can’t play in that section. This takes care of the problem of top players not wanting to play much lower rated players, and is the best way to do so.
If the tournament is open, or has “under” sections, then I don’t think there should be any restrictions on playing up. One of the best ways to improve as a chess player is to play people better than yourself, and allowing players to do so is more important than making sure the top players only play each other. One of my friends (a Class B player at the time) once got to play a 2600+ rated IM in the first round of a US Open, and had a competitive game before ultimately losing on time. It was the thrill of his life. I don’t really care how the IM felt about having to play him. It comes with the territory.
Having said that, I know many of the big tournaments have restrictions on how far you can play up, and that’s the tournament organizer’s prerogative. You can restrict section eligibility any way you like, and as with anything else (entry fees, prize funds, etc.), your attendance will tell you how acceptable it is.
I think it’s a bigger deal in the top section, where players are likely playing for the most money, and possibly for FIDE ratings or norms. Yes, some players won’t like being paired (way) down, but until you have a parent demand her kid play the highest rated player in the scoregroup, you haven’t seen unreasonable complaints.
In any scenario you must explicitly define which section(s) unrated players are allowed to play in. It may make sense to differentiate between adult and junior unrateds. The thing is you don’t want to have unrated players play in sections they wouldn’t be allowed in if they were rated.
There is a major organizer who will sometimes have the sections as U1100/unr, U1300/unr, 1200-1499/unr, 1400-1699/unr, 1600-1899/unr, 1800-2099, 2000+. The one I work in that format seems fairly successful with the 300-point rating bands. Or you can raise the upper end of each band to make it 400-point ranges (essentially double-classes).
A nice thing about chess is that organizers can try all sorts of different formats to find the ones that enough players like to play in (no format will be the one that EVERYBODY wants, but a group of different formats has a better chance of everybody liking at least one of them).
At one point CCA had a policy of permitting juniors to play up for a reduced EF (presumably to deal with complaints that the kids were snarfing much of the under section money by shifting them into higher sections). This failed spectacularly when kids playing up still won a lot of money.
It seems nowadays, playing up is either unrestricted or restricted to at most one section. I’ve seen some tournaments with surcharges to play up, particularly into the open section, and particularly if the open section is FIDE rated. But generally, it seems you just pay the regular EF for the section entered.
Unrateds can play where unrateds are permitted to play. Period. I’m not even sure why you would ask such a question.
I fully understand why young improving players want to face stronger players by playing up, but I also have sympathy for the higher rated players in a section who get paired with those players, ones they will often totally dominate. They get lousy tie breaks from them (if that matters, which it often does not) and it really hurts their chances for FIDE norms in norm-eligible events. There’s something to be said in favor of limiting entries in FIDE-rated sections to players with a FIDE rating above some point. Holding futurity events is one way to help those improving players, because the FIDE-rated players in a futurity are there by design.
The problem with unrateds is that if you truly don’t know anything about their strength, there’s no reasonable way to encourage them to enter a strength-appropriate section, so your options as a tournament designer are limited. The good news these days is that with most events rated within a day or two, someone’s time as a truly unrated player is generally limited to one or two events.
OK. So, what do you see as the issue? Yes, an unrated could be really pretty bad and would be grossly overmatched in a >2000 strength open section. Provide either an unrated section, or a low-rated section which allows unrateds but limits their winnings. Same as you would if you had a multiple section tournament which didn’t restrict how far people could play up.
In some ways it makes sense to allow unrated in only the higher sections – e.g. Open, U2000, U1800 but not U1600, U1400, U1200. That way you won’t have strong unrateds grabbing all the prize money intended for the lower players.
The opposite philosophy, to allow unrated only in the very lowest section, might make sense too, because the lower players could play up just one section to avoid the unrateds. And it’s always good to convince lower players to play up a section (isn’t it?).
Having a separate unrated section helps to avoid some of the problems, but it seems to isolate the unrateds from the rest of the tournament, and it could be argued that pairing unrated against rated assimilates the unrated into tournament chess and makes them feel more as if they belong.
Limiting prizes is always tricky. What do you do with the prize money withheld in this manner? Complicated formulas could be the result.
Aside from that, an unrated player is normally assigned an initial rating based on his performance against rated players. If all he (or she) has played is other unrated players, you don’t have any basis for comparison. This is probably not an insurmountable problem (after all, there was once a time when nobody had ratings), but it seems desirable to have new players play at least some of their games against rated players, for the purpose of establishing an initial rating.
National events suggest that when you have a large enough event to justify a separate unrated section, the unrated section tends to have a number of played-but-not-yet-rated players in them, which helps improve the accuracy of everyone’s first post-event ratings. But if you only have two or three unrated players in your event, having a separate section for them may not be doing them any favors.
A separate, yet related, question is: What’s the best size for a section? Is 16 the ideal size for a 4 round event?
In general you should only allow players to play up at most one section. After that it just gets frustrating for the higher rated players. Similarly in general I think unrateds should be allowed to play in any section. That way they can pick the section based on the strength they think they are. They don’t always do that correctly, but it only lasts a tournament or two for them.
I’m not opposed to limiting prize money to unrateds in lower sections to guarantee the integrity of the section.
There are, of course, exceptions to this. It depends on the type of tournament.
Wouldn’t it be unfair to allow a beginner who is unrated to play up more than one section but a beginner with a rating not to? On the other hand, forcing unrated players into one of the bottom two sections could cause problems since some unrateds may be at a higher level.
Well, that’s kind of Mr. Buklis’ point. No one really knows what it means when a player claims to be “a beginner”, so a player with a 389/4 or 1120/8 rating has at least some basis as to which flavor of beginner we’re dealing with, but a player with no rating at all offers no such assurances. At least his way players are allowed to self-assess.
Allowing players to play up at most 200 points (e.g. must be at least 1600 to play in the top section if the second section is U1800), while allowing unrated in the top section, sounds like the best compromise in most situations. It gets rid of the most obscene play-up attempts, while still letting the (usually very few) unrateds choose.
Don’t forget, too, that a TD is allowed to assign ratings to players, as (for example) the CCA minimum rating list does.
Also, a player might have a “hidden” rating – for example not on the official supplement for the month because his first event was just last week. In such a case a TD could reasonably use the “hidden” rating from an MSA crosstable.
If a TD knows anything at all about a player, the TD can always try to strong-arm the player into an appropriate section.
A far greater problem is “unrated” but strong players (e.g. foreign nationals with ratings in other countries) wanting to play in the lowest sections to snatch all the prize money. If anything, the lowest sections (U1200 or U1000) are the ones that unrateds should not be permitted to enter. Let’s stop using “D-E-Unrated” as the name of one of the sections in class tournaments.
i’ve stopped playing in tournaments that charge a premium to play up in an “open” section. if it’s an open section, why charge a premium? i get it that it might be more difficult to FIDE-rate the event, or for entrants maybe going for norms…
Most tournaments do not have strong foreign nationals try to enter as unrateds. If a strong player with a foreign or FIDE rating does enter the TD can always assign a US Chess rating based on the appropriate conversion formula. Most unrated players are not very good, and for most tournaments U1400/Unrated really is a reasonable way to handle this.