Recently I was reading a post on chess ninja. It described the re-entry system as greed oriented and ultimately unethical from a competitive standpoint. The writer has vowed to never play in a tourney that had re-entry. He also tied this to the “downward” turn in adult tourney participation. I have never considered re-entry as anything but an opportunity to improve upon a bad start ----and a little extra cash for the tourney itself (not a bad thing). Any thoughts out there?
I have held one tourney with re-entry. No one did it. It was a Denker fund raiser and I did hope to add a little more $$ to the State Denker fund through some re-entries.
Players who re-enter are more likely than not to be greed-oriented, but there are some who do it just to have a better chance of playing stronger opponents.
The percentage of re-entering players who actually win money because of their re-entry has been noticed to be significantly lower than the percentage who do not re-enter. Because of that, some organizers have seen re-entries as a source of extra cash from players very unlikely to win prizes because of it. I feel that part of the reason for the lower percentage is that a player who does well early has a better chance of winning a prize (without needing to re-enter) than a player who re-enters and has to “replay” the first round(s). Also, players that are off their game for the first round(s) have a higher than normal chance of being off their game again in the re-entered first round(s), particularly since the re-entered round(s) are likely to be at a faster time control than they originally signed up for (and thus wanted to play at).
The first local tournament here that did re-entries was one that had a split first round (Friday night and Saturday morning) that merged for a Saturday afternoon second round. We had an occasional player lose on Friday night and go for a second try Saturday morning at the same time control.
One TD issue with re-entries is to make sure you have handled them properly in your pairing software to make sure the original first round opponent isn’t paired again with a re-entered player (I know that WinTD and SwissSys have that capability, and I am guessing that some of the other pairing programs do also, but not every TD knows how to use the capability).
I think the issue of “greed” probably comes from allowing a reentry into round 2 with a half-point bye. Personally it doesn’t bother me; a new player can start in round 2 with the same half-point bye.
He’d better stop playing in tournaments altogether, then. Re-entry is now so common that, even if an organizer allowed re-entry without advance notice, he probably wouldn’t get in trouble with USCF.
An exaggeration. This varies widely by region. In Southern California, virtually no tournaments except Bill Goichberg’s allow re-entries. I agree that there is no USCF policy requiring announcement of this either way, so if it’s a big deal to a player he should ask before entering.
Well, there are, in the sense that the PB voted some while back to allow them in Grand Prix tournaments. (There was a major argument about this around 1983.)
While I personally find re-entries repugnant (stripped to essentials, they amount to paying for points), I agree that it’s not something the USCF should try to regulate. Let the market decide.
There are plenty of rules dealing with the specifics of re-entries (28S, 28S1, 28S2, 28S3, 28S4, 28S5, 32C5, 34H). None of these, however, deals with whether the availability of re-entries needs to be announced in pre-tournament publicity.
By the way, does anybody see a conflict between 28S5 and 32C5?
Yes. These are both new to the 5th edition, and were probably written at different times. 28S5 seems absurd, by the way – in the unlikely event that I ever ran a tournament with re-entries, I would certainly specify that only the latest score could be used.
Personally, I’d go along with the highest score rather than the latest. But I could see somebody doing it your way, especially somebody who wants to discourage re-entries to begin with.
I find the logic a little hard to follow – a player should not be able to gain the benefit of a re-entry and keep the result of his “abandoned” entry in reserve – but, since I reject re-entries to begin with, the point is somewhat academic.
These seem fine to me. The “latest” entry at the time of prize determination is the one which was carried forward into the later rounds (latest played vs latest started).
What if his “best score” is not the same as his “latest score”? (A player scores 2-1. He re-enters a different schedule. He finishes that schedule with one point.) If you are saying that his 2-point score should have been “carried forward” to the later rounds – that would require that the TD check after the number of rounds had “caught up” for each player to see if that player deserved more points. Does anyone run tournaments this way?
I diasagree with the “should,” but leave that aside. Try doing this in something like the World Open, and I think you’ll soon find the practical problems insuperable. In practice, of course, this isn’t very important, since the kind of player who will pay to reenter a big tournament is not likely to keep playing with a bad score.
I omitted the part of 28S5 that says “unless the organizer states otherwise”. If it’s a big tournament and it’s hard to keep track of reentries, then simply declare that a reentry must abandon all recourse to the earlier entry.
Re-entries and multiple schedule entries are different beasts.
The latter occur in parallel.
I think it would have been possible to play as many as five different schedules for the 2004 US Open, but only one of those results could be carried into the merged event.
The player should have the option to choose which one that is. Most of the time I would expect that to be the one that has the highest score, but there may be cases where a player might want to ‘swiss gambit’ a lower score into the merged event.
A ‘reentry’ is (to me, at least) somewhat simpler. It implies withdrawal of the earlier entry, and thus abandonment of those results. Moreover, there are no parallel schedule issues.
The issue of whether a multiple entry/merged or re-entered player should be paired against a previous opponent could get tricky.
Suppose player X enters two schedules of a major event and gets paired against the top player in a round of schedule A. If he carries the schedule B result into the merged event and winds up in the highest point group along with that top player for the last round, I don’t think he should receive much (possibly not any) special pairing consideration for that earlier game from the other schedule.
If that’s what 32C5 means, then it looks to me like a mere definition, and an unnecessary one at that (“the latest score is whichever one is latest”).
It’s possible that 32C5 was designed to prevent a player from winning more than one prize. What if, for example, a player’s re-entered score qualifies him for clear 3rd overall, while his abandoned score qualifies him for 1st under-1800? 32C5 might just be saying that these “two” players can win only one prize between them.
I don’t understand this example. Regardless whether you are using “best score” or “latest score”, I don’t see how this could happen.
If you’re using “best score” (28C5), then the player cannot possibly finish with one point, since his 2-1 result would have been the one carried forward at the time.
If you’re using “latest score” (the opposite of 28C5), then the 2-1 score would have been abandoned at the time of re-entry, and wouldn’t be in the picture.
Either way, I don’t get it.
Not unless you are using one score for pairings, but the other for standings, round by round. I certainly hope NOBODY is suggesting that.
What about fairness to the other player? It seems like you’re suggesting that it is OK to pair player X with the player that he played in the earlier schedule, yes?