Proposal from the Ratings Committee

I also do not support all chess players under ten should not play in a rated over-the-board tournament. My point is this, if an under ten year old does well in an unrated scholastic tournament, the under ten year old should move into the regular tournaments then the scholastic tournaments.

The point of the scholastic tournaments in a nut shell is to weed out the players that should not be in an over-the-board tournament. In my judgment, the scholastic tournaments have been the cruelest part of rated tournaments. Organizers do not make it the goal to weed out the adults to find the masters, with scholastic tournament it’s designed to find the next grandmaster.

With the goal to find the next Bobby Fischer, it has produced the waste product of 100 rated players. Just to find the next grandmaster, it has not served the common good; it only has served the innate selfishness to produce FIDE titled players. If it is the goal to produce the next generation of FIDE titled players, with any production of any material there is going to be some type of waste product, that waste product has become the low rated or the 100 rated members.

It seems that scholastic chess wants to exist on its own for those players who cannot handle or do not prefer more serious chess. Scholastic organizers of all sorts, and maybe kids as well, would be unhappy if USCF limited the number of entries or events they could have. I’m glad that USCF is attempting quality control for organizers, but the kids will still be inexperienced and far from tournament level with few exceptions.

And we should try to avoid distortions of the tournament and rating environment for players who are above the scholastic level.

A few months ago I played in the B section of a weekend swiss. I was the #2 seed. First place was taken by a 9 year old who beat me. Second place was taken by another 9 year old. Am I old enough to play in tournaments? I’d like to see if I can repeat in my section of the GA Senior Open.

Not to endorse what you went through …

But there have always been a few talented young “junior” players who have always been welcome in adult tournaments. It would be interesting to know whether these two came up thru scholastics or not.

I would endorse something that would keep tournament chess as an opportunity for those really wanting to try it. That means that you enter yourself in an adult (or junior) tournament. The problems arise from coping with a flood of young people who aren’t even looking for that: they’re in an after-school program.

There are going to be scholastic tournaments, granted. It is that the director can influence if the scholastic tournament is going to be a rated tournament or, an unrated tournament more than most people can think. True, it is still up to the organizer if the tournament are going to be USCF rated or non-rated. The posters that are going to make posts for or against the idea are going to be USCF members. That is going to lead it to a one sided issue.

There are in my judgment two different types of chess coaches, the ones that are USCF members and the others that are not USCF members. In general I really do not have a problem with USCF members, as they do understand what does happen or should happen at a tournament. The problems I see are a great deal are the organizers of scholastic tournaments as the non-USCF members that want a chess tournament.

It becomes annoying to teach the simplest rules of chess. That stalemate is not checkmate, the pawn can be promoted to a queen or you can have more than one queen, teaching en passant is legal, teaching about insufficient material to win a game. This is not about teaching the players during the game, this is teaching the chess coach that is teaching the scholastic students. If I want I can influence this coach or coaches to have a rated tournament, but who really gets the benefit from such a rated tournament?

What is the point of having a group of scholastic players in my judgment are performing at a 100 rating, which would be massacred if they had to play in any other state or national organized scholastic tournament? The goal to play in over-the-board tournaments is to play in other types of tournaments organized with other organizers and run by other directors. If I influence this type of coach to have a rated tournament, in the end the scholastic players are going to be at or close to the rating of 100. Is not the problem that the scholastic players are going down to the rating floor of 100 or close to it, would I not as the director just make a bad problem worse just because I influenced the coach to have the tournament rated. Therefore, directors that want rated tournament could be part of the problem with rated players at the rating floor of 100.

My argument is that the certified tournament director gets the limited amount of credits with the entries and the events for the requirements of advancement to the next level of certification. Did not make a claim the scholastic players should be limited to the number of events.

If there is an area of the country that has a surplus of active TDs, I don’t know where it is. Here in Nebraska a number of the TDs (like myself) don’t direct much anymore. Others have moved away or dropped out of chess entirely. We even have an ANTD who moved back to Nebraska from California last year, but the last time I checked he wasn’t even a current USCF member.

I know the USCF has been scrambling to find enough TDs to run the big national events.

As a result, I don’t see the merits of changing our procedures to make it harder to become a local or senior TD. Becoming a club TD is trivial, even renewing at the club level is possible these days (and not all that difficult.)

Pairing programs and online submission have made the mechanical aspects of directing easier, though at times I do worry that we will have a generation of TDs who don’t know when the computer pairings are bad. (It’s rare, but not unheard of.)

And if someone lives in an area with too many TDs, please convince one or two of them to move to Nebraska.

BTW, recently I had an email from the parent of a young player who has been trying to get a TD to submit a correction to an event. (It involves, among other things, a wrong ID, we need the right ID from the TD.)

When I asked the parent about it, the response was something like, “Yeah, we know XX is not that great a TD, but having a TD is better than not having one.”

I’ve played a number of players in “adult” who played in scholastic tournaments that I’ve directed. A few of those players beat me in adult tournaments while still participating in the scholastic events. I can recall one kid who saw me playing in the same tournament as him at the Marshall Chess Club say to me, “I didn’t know you played in tournaments, I thought you just directed.” I don’t think I played him in that particular tournament, but we did play each other at another tournament.

New York may be unique in the number of strong juniors that come up the ranks through scholastic chess. There are many strong scholastic events to choose from, and there’s a lot of tournaments open to all that the kids play in.

Both of the children I mentioned show on the MSA as playing in rated scholastics at the age of 6 and began playing in adult events a few months later. Both have one national scholastic championships in their age group, and in fact in Atlanta they faced each other in the last round in Orlando having shed only 1/2 point between them. Most of our adult tournaments are about 50% juniors, and they do quite well. At our State Championship every section was won by a junior, including the title.

All of this talk about kids having to cut their teeth in unrated events before they should play in a rated event is rather elitist. If they know how to properly move, capture and checkmate, what does it hurt for them to experience a real rated tournament and the higher rated kids? It’s my opinion that more kids are likely to strive to increase their skill and participate in rated events after such exposure. Those that don’t simply won’t and that’s ok too.

Who cares if there are a bunch of kids with a 100 rating. Many of them think it’s neat to have any kind of a national rating. They’ve tested the waters and may someday decide to emerge from the 100 rated pool. At least the experience was more positive than being slammed with a rating of 2 or denied a rating and the indirect encouragement to never try again.

As a matter of internal mechanics, the rating system could treat 100 rated players as unrated without actually calling them unrated. That way, when some of the kids later decide to get more serious about the game, they don’t have the inertia of a 100 rating holding their advancement back.

It would be very difficult to draw a clear line between scholastic and open chess ratings. A lot of the better scholastic players play in both, which is a good thing for the future of chess. In Oklahoma we actively encourage this for the 900+ rated scholastic players. Its all part of a large continuum in the shape of a pyramid with a broad 100 rated foundation.

Mike Swatek
Senior TD

ps, “adult” tournament is a much less appropriate term than “open for all ages” tournament or simply “open” tournament, unless of course if its a “senior” tournament.

Then there’s a threshold at 100. If there are a lot of players, this threshold creates a significant rating inflation / distortion around that level. Everyone cares about their rating – which is why you don’t want a kid to be rated 2 – so whose ox will we select be gored?

I proposed a system of reporting a higher rating than a player actually has: I gave an example of a player with an actual rating of -130 but it would be reported as 10 so at least it’s not negative. (A suggested improvement was to put the floor at 100 rather than zero; these things can be jiggered within the general framework.) This little lie would be taken care of behind the scenes and hopefully the players wouldn’t think too hard about what was going on. The proposal was made in a spirit of hopelessness, it’s a very bad proposal, but one or two people have actually voiced support because they don’t see a better idea.

Then these players could have two ratings. The games are more different than quick and slow chess, it seems to me, and we have separate ratings for those (to be revised as I understand it to quick+slow and slow, but still two separate ratings).

I don’t think either the Scholastic Council or the Executive Board supports this proposal. I think it is a bad idea for several reasons.

  1. Why not have a lot of players at 100? Someone has to have the lowest rating, and if they have a lot of company they won’t feel as bad about it. The “solution” here is worse than the problem, if there is a problem at all which I doubt.

  2. “Play at least 4 games and get a USCF rating” is simple. Why complicate things and have kids who misunderstand disappointed when their expected rating does not appear?

  3. As has been pointed out here, it makes no sense that a player with a 99 performance followed by a 600 performance would end up with a 600 rating, while one with a 100 performance followed by a 600 performance would end up with a much lower rating (350 if both events are the same length). FIDE does it this way, but that doesn’t make it right.

  4. Prizes for very low ratings like Under 300 or Under 200 are easier to win than unrated prizes. The player with a performance under 100 in his first event should not have to compete for unrated trophies next time when such low class trophies are available.

Bill Goichberg