Please help me figure out how to get my college students USCF-rated so they can compete in non-college tournaments and gain some experience.
We are a tribal college with a fairly new chess team. I am a mediocre player myself, just standing in until we can find a better mentor for them.
Until now, our team only competed once a year at the national conference for tribal colleges (AIHEC). The students want to do more! So we are doing k-12 outreach now, and we want to go to at least a couple of open tournaments, but I see that they all need USCF ratings in order to do that.
I see the ratings process here on the website, but if someone is brand new, how can they get an official rating, and is there a way to expedite this?
Thank you so much!
Jenni Rodin
Math Professor and Adviser to the Chess Team
Oglala Lakota College
Pine Ridge Indian Reservation
SD
You have it backwards. Your players do not need to have a rating to enter an open tournament. They will get a rating as a result of playing in a tournament.
Your playersdoneed to become members of USCF to play in a tournament. They can take care of that online at the USCF website a few days before the tournament. Or, at most tournaments, your players can join USCF at the tournament itself.
There doesn’t seem to be much, if any, rated tournament activity in South Dakota (your home state and mine) right now, but you can step across the border into Iowa and find a few good tournaments each year.
Another option would be for someone (you?) to become a TD and acquire an affiliate and have internal tournaments among your team. Not as ideal as Mr. Smythe’s suggestion, but maybe more practical in an area of few open tournaments.
Mr. Relyea’s suggestion is a good one. I would also reassure you that it is possible for players to obtain official ratings even if every player starts the tournament unrated. In the absence of any other information, the US Chess rating system starts a player with an estimated rating based on the player’s age. Specifically, the estimated rating is 50 times the player’s age in years (including any fractional part of a year), with a minimum of 150 and a maximum of 1300. A player must have a minimum of four rated games to have an official (published) rating, but those four games do not have to come from one tournament.
Admittedly, it is not ideal to have to develop rated players starting from a completely unrated pool, but it is possible. In general, small closed pools of players are problematic for the rating system (the story of Claude Bloodgood is a particularly extreme example). In a closed pool, the rating system will reflect the relative strength of the players in the pool, but the ratings will not be anchored to “the larger world.” In your situation, that will be addressed as your players take advantage of admittedly scarce opportunities to play in open tournaments (and they will probably enjoy meeting new opponents as well).
(Edited: correct minimum age based initial rating. The minimum is 150, not 300.)