A section should not be called “open” if it is rating-restricted in any way. A corollary is that there is no such thing as “playing up” into an open section.
If there is a lower (or upper!) rating limit, or an extra charge for lower-rated or unrated players, then don’t call it “open”. Call it Major, Premier, Championship, Elite, or something else along these lines, and state the entry requirements explicitly, such as “open to players rated 1800 or over or unrated”, or whatever.
Bill Smythe
Agreed about an “open” section needing to have no rating restrictions, but I don’t see how having a sliding scale of entry fees based on rating means the section is not “open”. “Open” in no way implies that everyone can enter at the same price, just that everyone can enter. This from Wikipedia, “An open tournament in sports terminology refers to a sporting event or game tournament that is open to contestants regardless of their professional or amateur status, age, ability, gender, sex, or other categorization.”
Nevertheless, it seems perverse that those who have the least chance of winning a prize should pay the highest entry fee.
That’s either nonsense or really (really) poorly worded. The US (Tennis) Open is “Open” solely with regards to the professional or amateur status. To even be invited to the qualifiers you have to be roughly top 150 in the world. The US (Golf) Open is also similarly open with regards to professional status and, while qualifying is “open” to many more players than tennis, it still requires basically a scratch handicap in order to even play in the qualifiers.
Are there any competitive activities other than chess where an average amateur player could literally walk in off the street and have a reasonable chance to be paired against one of the top 100 players in the world?
Poker, maybe? But the buy-ins are a whole lot higher.
Bridge. Pros are often paid to play with amateurs. Similarly, golf pro-ams (though there I don’t think you pay the pro directly, but just play $$$$ to enter, much of which goes to charity). But yes, not very common.
If you look at the tournament cited in the OP, the Open section had 53 entrants. Of those, only 14 actually had no option to play in a lower section. Some of the 1800 and 1900’s who played up to get better competition were getting paired down in round 1 to play 1400’s (and sometimes then in round 3 as well). One of the players had a 900 rating, and it was not all that stale (played November 2021) and he played to it. While there were a handful of the people playing up that had results that indicated that it was not an unreasonable decision (one player went 1818–>1948, one 1687–>1797), most were at best flat (result something like LLLLBD with the draw against another player who probably should have been two or three sections lower).
I doubt a player with a 900 rating and 900 playing strength is playing in an open section intending to win money. I’m not sure I see what would motivate someone to do that when there were U1400, U1700 and U2000 sections if they wanted to play up, but clearly some people have been convinced that playing up 1000 points is good for you (or more likely, good for your child). If you want to make sure the open section is a competition among strong chess players, you will either need to put a hard restriction on how far you can play up, or put in a substantial upcharge to discourage nonsensical entries.
I once TD’d a tournament where a player with a rating in the 800’s entered the Open Section when there were U2000, U1800, U1600, and U1400 sections available. He was an adult, and his rating accurately reflected his playing strength. He could not be talked out of it. He realized he was going to lose every game, and he didn’t care. He just wanted the opportunity to play a few games against top notch talent, and he was willing to pay for it.
Pro-ams in tennis and golf strike me as the equivalent of simuls in chess, they aren’t serious tournaments.
Also, in most pro-ams that I’m familiar with, the “am” half of the team is a celebrity of some sort, like a pro athlete from some other sport, or a famous actor or musician or something. It’s never anyone like me.
Even in chess, I would add that my chances of playing anyone famous (in a non-simul) are pretty slim. Even when I go to a big tournament like the US Open, I’m far enough below the cut that I start out facing an A player, or at best an Expert. And unless I score one or more big upsets early on, that’s the best player I’m going to see. I’ve never gotten close to playing any of the world top 100 (or even the US top 100).
I have played some famous people – Awonder Liang and Hans Niemann come to mind – but that was long ago when they were little kids and not yet famous. I would have no chance of playing either of them now.
I had a neighbor who was seriously into golf, he was in a number of pro-ams with some very well-known golfers. But he was a corporate executive and each pro-am cost him several thousand dollars.
Indeed. Those things are fundraisers for charity.
Something LIV Golf doesn’t seem to do.
Yes, and the US Chess rulebook even recommends doing this.
The tournament used the following rating policy: “The official September US Chess over-the-board regular ratings are generally used for section eligibility, pairings, and prize eligibility. Unofficial US Chess over-the-board regular ratings, US Chess online regular ratings, or converted foreign ratings are generally used for players with no official US Chess over-the-board regular rating.”
We ended up using unofficial OTB regular ratings for five players, converted FIDE ratings for two players, and a US Chess online regular rating for one player and using these alternate ratings worked well for appropriate section placement.
On the flip side of this, a lot of unrateds are beginners and forcing them to play up seems odd.
It’s interesting to note that the Oregon Open was held Saturday through Monday and had a Rapid side event on Saturday night and a Blitz side event on Sunday night. The unrated players who played in the main tournament and also the Rapid and/or Blitz had their regular rating from the main tournament initialized from the rating the initial rating they got from the Rapid and/or Blitz!
In Northern California, it has become tradition for the vast majority of players to enter a higher section. Hence an A section would be filled with mostly 1600s and 1700s. They are only permitted to play up 200 rating points, else I am sure many would enter two sections higher.
Labor Day tournament (last weekend):
X section had 17 players, 3 rated 2000+, all 3 won money.
A section had 30 players, 6 rated 1800+, 2 of those won money.
B section had 25 players, 8 rated 1600+, 2 of those won money.
C section had 23 players, 6 rated 1400+, 4 of those won money.
In order to play opponents near your rating, you are more or less obligated to play up.
Of course, the organizer is happy to collect the additional fees, up to $30 per player.
There were 9 unrateds out of 186 total players. One finished near the bottom of the D section. The others all played in an E/unr section and 2 of those won money.
Michael Aigner
That’s because U.S. Chess uses ending date, not starting date, to determine the order in which to rate events.
Thus it would follow that, not only would new ratings (for unrated players) in the Open be initialized from post-event ratings in the Rapid and/or Blitz, but also, new Blitz ratings would be initialized from post-event Rapid ratings.
But the rating algorithm is, if I’m not mistaken, a 2-pass process, and even a 3-pass process for newbies. Furthermore, I think initializations from cross-system ratings (such as Open from Rapid or Blitz) are considered to be P/0 (provisional based on 0 games), which means that, at least in theory, the post-event rating of a newbie will come out almost exactly the same regardless of what is used for his first-pass initialized rating.
Perhaps the above is an oversimplification, or worse, in which case I’m sure Tom Doan will step in here and set the record straight.
Bill Smythe
This is incorrect Bill. For example, look at the rating history of this player, uschess.org/msa/MbrDtlTnmtHst.php?30694589
This is the chess version of the Prisoner’s Dilemma. If each player would rather play up than play level, and would rather play level than play down, then if other people choose to play up, I need to play up as well, and if other people choose to play level, I prefer to play up. So everyone plays up, which means, basically, that no one does.
It’s slightly more complicated than that, Bill.
Sections are sorted based on four keys:
This guarantees a consistent and unambiguous ordering of sections for rating. Note that if two sections in an event have the same beginning and ending date, the section number determines the order in which those sections are rated, so the TD does have some control over which equitemporal sections are rated first. This could be relevant if there are, say, morning quads and afternoon quads. It also means that an extra games section is rated last if it has the same beginning and ending dates as the main section(s) but a higher section number.
We have looked at rating all of the games from an event (or a series of events, like all the games on the same weekend) as a single block of games, but it would mess with things like the bonus formula.
The blended initialization formula has a number of things that are different from the previous initialization procedures, including how to compute the number of games the seeded rating is based on. P0 is basically only used when initializing someone’s rating based on their age or membership type.
You’re a year behind the times, Bill. The based-upon-zero initializations (and extra rating pass) are used only for players for whom we have no prior rating information. Anyone with any of the other usable ratings (the other five US Chess ratings, FIDE or CFC) will have, at a minimum, credit for 1 game, and usually more (up to a max of 10). The b0 calculations caused all kinds of problems when people were first starting to play on-line tournaments
I wonder how universal that logic is. For me, level is better than either up or down, because I want a competitive game. Mismatches are no fun for the lower-rated player, and no challenge for the higher-rated player – i.e., they’re pointless. But if I have to play a mismatch, I’d rather be the higher-rated player, because (for me) fun is more important than challenge, and winning is more fun than losing. So my order of preference is level, down, up. Trumping all that, however, is my intense hatred of forced byes. If I go to a 5-round tournament, I want to play 5 games. Any less than that, and I feel cheated.
Because of all that, in a sectional tournament, I will always play in the lowest section for which I’m eligible. This would be true even in a Northern California-type situation. The one thing I want to avoid at all costs is being near the bottom of my section – because that puts me at high risk of the dreaded forced bye. Also, even though I don’t mind playing up once in a while, doing so every game gets old fast. At any given tournament, I would like at least a few games where I have a reasonable chance of winning.