just curious what others thing about how many sections an “open” tournament should have. i used to like going to the national open when it was an open (two sections?- i don’t recollect). now it has many different sections. of course they may have had to go this route due to the number of participants.
i prefer a two-section open with class prizes within the sections.
…scot…
As you hinted at, perhaps it should depend partially on your total expected turnout. With 5 rounds, you’d want approximately 30-50 players per section. (You can go a little higher than 2^N players for N rounds because of the likelihood of some draws.)
So, for 100 players with 5 rounds, 2-3 sections seems about right. For 200 players, maybe 5 sections.
Of course, you’d want to have players in each of those sections. If you seldom attract players rated below 1200, you probably shouldn’t have an under-1200 section. Or, if you seldom attract masters, you probably shouldn’t have a separate Experts section. Of course, actually running an under-1200 section might finally attract more under-1200 players than you typically get, and similarly, having a separate Expert section might attract more masters.
It’s all a big guessing game, and trying to push the market in one direction or another can be unpredictable.
Bill Smythe
Assuming you’re thinking about organizing some events, tt sounds like you don’t really know what the local player base is like yet.
You can use the demographic search tool in the TD/Affiliate Support Area to get an idea of how many active players there are at various age levels or ratings classes. Use ZIP code ranges to focus on the geographic market you’re hoping to reach.
This can get messy because ZIP codes were not designed for demographic work, outside of metro areas they might be in something close to an alphabetical order but in a metro area there’s no rhyme or reason why two ZIP codes that aren’t close to each other numerically might be close to each other geographically.
You can then use this information to reach out to players either by email or postal mail. (Members who have opted out of either email or postal mail contact won’t be reachable.)
Another useful tool is to look up an affiliate, and then see what players are regulars in their events.
Keep in mind that only the top section is truly an ‘open’ event, and not always then. (There are events with minimum ratings per section as well as maximum ratings per section.)
Some lower rated players like events where they might get paired with a master or an expert, others don’t.
I prefer an open, u1600 and an RBO u1200. Usually, We run one
section with an u1600 prize. As pointed out, it depends on size
For clubs and tournaments that truly “get it” understanding the importance of getting our emerging youths involved, a
U800 section does much to gain new members. US Chess is, I do believe, doing a very poor job overall of offering our youngsters
a “bridge” between scholastic and “regular” chess play- and this is a key and very real reason why so many of our kids are done with chess
when their primary, or elementary school years are complete, and this is a very real shame.
Rob Jones
the problem is, many middle (junior) and high schools don’t have teams. if the elementary kids had a next step and could be shown the importance of continuing to compete with their teammates (and have fun!) might be easier. lot more college scholarships out there than when i was growing up, too!
…scot…
My point here is that u1200 (from the example presented by Birdsman) is not nearly low enough for CLUB/NON-Scholastic
events. We as members/organizers/promoters of US Chess really need to take up the mantle our very BANNER, and encourage the progression of our scholastic chess youths to our regular chess events open to all - and to do this, we need
sections designed for their ratings level, perhaps even with trophies, so that they can realistically compete. And as important, have these “booster”, “novice” or whatever you wish to call them sections, open to adults as well. For, yes,
we do have adults participating on a regular basis at several of the events I direct for various DFW area affiliates in these
lower sections - and why not? Why should new/novice level adults be subject to getting “crushed” or 1000+ level adults
be subject to the “boredom” of playing them, if the numbers attending offer such lower sections? This I fear is one of the
holes in many clubs typical tournament structures - lack of competitive sections offered to their lower ability level players,
regardless of age.
Rob Jones
Every year our club tinkers a little bit with our tournaments to find the “sweet spot” to match the demographics and wishes of our club members. Since we hold inexpensive tournaments, a mistake or two will not hurt us much. This year our MCC April Showers tournament will have two sections rather than one. We decided on two sections because our last couple of tournaments had larger entries and outgrew the 4 round format we normally use. Based on the type of players we draw, we have decided to have an Open section with class prizes for U1800 and U1600 and an U1400 section with class prizes of trophies for U1000, U800, and U600. Each section will draw adult and youth entrants. Likely there will be 12+ in the Open and 16+ in the Booster sections. One of the draws to the event is that we offer door prizes of various kinds (books, chess sets, candy bars, etc.), which the players have told us is a nice touch.
The problem is not the lower section. It is offering an Open which will draw out stronger players who want to play games where they can gain rating points while playing interesting games. Stronger players will come to an inexpensive event where trophies are given if they get to play good games. We set the cutoff at 1400 for the Booster because we normally don’t see many Class C players competing in our tournaments, but do have enough adult players who are under 1300 rated and kids under 900 rated to make this section competitive every round. If the demographics of the tournaments change, we will adapt and tinker with the format for next year’s events.
Check out the Illinois Chess website for a couple of tournaments in April where the Rated Beginners sections are under-1200 and under-800. These draw well, from both the adult and scholastic chess communities. Yes, under-800 sections are viable.
Bill Smythe
Here’s a table showing players active since 1/1/2016 by age group (based on today’s date) with a breakdown of those rated under 1400:
[code] age total Unr U600 600-799 800-999 1000-1199 1200-1399 1400+
12/below 60966 7815 39463 6366 3388 1810 988 1136
13-15 20362 1687 8675 3225 2472 1533 1031 1739
16-19 13116 1171 3201 1866 1871 1445 1093 2469
20-24 3958 418 307 274 339 442 452 1726
25-49 11837 1404 376 430 731 1066 1453 6377
50-64 5950 331 120 141 258 400 670 4030
65+ 3457 142 83 104 158 296 431 2243[/code]
Here’s that same breakdown for players in Illinois:
[code] age total Unr U600 600-799 800-999 1000-1199 1200-1399 1400+
12/below 2862 308 2018 267 133 60 37 39
13-15 986 60 451 156 124 82 49 64
16-19 724 46 152 82 113 93 66 172
20-24 213 16 9 13 16 18 28 113
25-49 564 49 33 28 36 60 70 288
50-64 258 10 3 12 10 18 15 190
65+ 132 4 10 7 8 10 14 79[/code]
Here’s an even more detailed breakdown of tournament-active ‘scholastic’ (ie, under 20) and ‘adult’ players who are either rated below 800 or don’t have a published rating yet in Illinois, this one is by metro area.
[code] metro total Scholastic Adult
Chicago-Naperville-Elgin IL-IN-WI 2600 2452 147
Bloomington IL 734 729 5
St. Louis MO-IL 122 111 11
Peoria IL 100 94 6
Champaign-Urbana IL 54 54 0
Mount Vernon IL 28 27 1
Kankakee IL 22 17 5
Rockford IL 11 8 3
Davenport-Moline-Rock Island IA-IL 10 7 3
Carbondale-Marion IL 7 6 1
Fort Madison-Keokuk IA-IL-MO 7 7 0
Decatur IL 7 7 0
Other 6 5 1
Springfield IL 6 3 3
Paducah KY-IL 5 5 0
Rochelle IL 3 3 0
Lincoln IL 3 1 2
Ottawa-Peru IL 2 2 0
Centralia IL 2 1 1
Jacksonville IL 1 0 1
Taylorville IL 1 0 1
Charleston-Mattoon IL 1 0 1
Quincy IL-MO 1 0 1
Cape Girardeau MO-IL 1 1 0
Macomb IL 1 0 1
[/code]
It seems to me that U/800 sections for adults might only be viable in the Chicago area.
Those under-1200 and under-800 sections in Chicago seem to attract both adults and kids, in about equal quantities – same as with the open and under-1800 sections.
Bill Smythe
Here’s the breakdown of players rated 800-1199 by metro area for Illinois, the available adults are pretty much mostly in the Chicago area, just like the U/800 ones:
[code] metro total Scholastic Adult
Chicago-Naperville-Elgin IL-IN-WI 587 450 137
Bloomington IL 80 73 7
St. Louis MO-IL 31 20 11
Peoria IL 24 23 1
Champaign-Urbana IL 16 15 1
Rockford IL 8 6 2
Davenport-Moline-Rock Island IA-IL 7 1 6
Other 5 4 1
Mount Vernon IL 4 3 1
Springfield IL 3 3 0
Kankakee IL 2 1 1
Charleston-Mattoon IL 2 0 2
Fort Madison-Keokuk IA-IL-MO 2 1 1
Ottawa-Peru IL 2 0 2
Decatur IL 2 2 0
Centralia IL 1 0 1
Galesburg IL 1 1 0
Jacksonville IL 1 1 0
Rochelle IL 1 1 0
Taylorville IL 1 0 1
Effingham IL 1 0 1
[/code]
I agree on all points above. But I think there is more to it.
One of those things that we can affect is the existence of Middle School and High School chess teams. Also, there is Little League baseball, soccer, hockey, football, softball, and so on. Why not chess? We focus on school-based teams, and the competition lasts an entire Saturday (for local events), and for long weekends for larger events. Meanwhile, a soccer game lasts an hour, and a Little League baseball game perhaps two.
So, at least in the larger metropolitan areas, a chess league is viable. Perhaps eight-player teams. If all players cannot attend a match, the coaches can work out between them how many boards the match will be on. Time control G30d5 for younger leagues, and maybe G45d5 for older, keeping the entire match to less than two hours.
Moving to the adult levels, I think there might be interest in company teams. Microsoft vs. Google. Wal*Mart vs. K-Mart. Whole Foods vs. Trader Joe’s.
On other notes, the ones who tend to drop out of chess are, frankly, not that good. Our lost lambs are the under-800 players who, even though they love the game, don’t like losing to 8-year-old kids. So perhaps we can create O21/U800 sections – adults only. The trick now is getting those people back. That may require email advertisement from old membership info. Can we TD’s and organizers get email lists of kids who dropped their memberships 10 years ago?
Under the current privacy policy, US Chess does not provide email addresses to third parties, but you can purchase email blasts.
Membership records show about 27,300 memberships that lapsed in 2008. Of these, about 6500 still have an email address in them, or around 23%. About 6000 of these are unique email addresses. Some of these will have opted out of email blasts by tournament organizers or be unusable for other reasons.
However, how likely is it that an email address that is 10 years old is still valid? US Chess does ‘bounce processing’ to try to remove email addresses that are no longer valid from member records, but most email blasts are to current or recently lapsed members, so most of those 10 year old email addresses will not have been tested in several years.
Similarly, someone who was 12 years old in 2008 may no longer be living at home at age 22, so the mailing address probably isn’t going to work either.
The challenges of how to reach out to former members are significant. Those who are young might be reachable through social media, but that’s a pretty broad brush. (Facebook is said to have 2 billion active monthly users, how many of them are former US Chess members?)
Maybe Cambridge Analytica can find that data from all the Facebook information it “scraped” from the company. Just think of all of the means it could use to influence people to play chess. Like unleashing Russian bots, for example. 
OTOH, they might lead people to show up to “fake” tournaments.
Even if it were possible to get such information, and format it into an email blast (thus being inline with US Chess policy)
how useful would this be. I would bet heavily that very, very, very few of them have even considered picking up the game
again.
Rob Jones
Probably a lot more than people who have never been USCF members at all.