Questions about US Amateur Team Tournaments

Running Chess Tournaments
1

I have a couple of questions about the upcoming Amateur Team Tournaments. Perhaps someone can let me know if I understand the following correctly.

Is it correct that the tournaments are run as one big open section?

The pairings are done like a swiss system, but with each team being pared based on their match points?

The ratings of the top 4 players one each team must average < 2200, so you could have 3 grandmasters on a team as long as the 4th player was rated low enough to bring the average down ?

How about the prize sections, like U1800. Do all the players on the team have to be rated under 1800 or is that also based on team average ?

Thanks for you help. The TLAs don’t have this kind of detail. I could go directly to the organizer with these questions, but I figured there would be others who would like to know and could read the answers here.

2

See below for general practices, but there might be exceptions, since organizers generally have some leeway.

Yes

Yes

That used to be possible, but after one such team won the USAT East, special restrictions have been instituted (at least for USAT East) to disallow it. An example of such restriction is that there cannot be more than 400 rating points difference between any consecutive boards. That probably would be strictest from such restrictions that were used. I think, they have now been relaxed a bit.

Team average.

3

More information may be available here:

njscf.org/2014-world-amateur-tea … am-east-2/

4

You’d expect so, wouldn’t you?

At least there’s a contact email address.