I am somewhat new to tournament directing and was wondering how you handle the following issue:
A player who wants to register for a tournament says they renewed their membership but the Golden Database shows expired. I have no access to internet in the building where we play and so I fear if I register the player based on their word and then go to submit the tournament results for rating I will get an error message and not be able to submit the event. How do you handle this scenario? Do you require that they show you a current membership card at the tourney? But then there still is the problem of submitting for ratings and the error message that you will get. Any recommendations would be appreciated.
If they don’t have proof in the form of a card or an email confirmation or MSA printout, I would take a $12 deposit in case you need to purchase a tournament membership. The money can be sent back by mail, or if a club, whenever the player visits next. I would not let them play otherwise. The other players in the tournaments have rights too, and I suspect the recently renewed player would expect you to do the same to ensure expedient results submission were it someone else trying to play under the same circumstances.
Only in the interest of completeness - the $12 deposit answer is a good one if your Golden is current … Another alternative is if you know other TDs (or simply other members) not playing but with an Internet connection wherever they are, give them a call and ask for them to make a player query for you. (Some of us don’t have data plans with our cell phones. )
Also, note that a membership card is not absolutely required - expirations are also printed on the Chess Life Paper mailing label. I’d accept that as proof of renewal, if the person had that. (But personally, I make sure that I have my membership card - and my TD card - with me in my tournament kit.)
We only create the Golden Master file once a month, so if you have the February file, which was created a couple of weeks ago, and someone claims he renewed YESTERDAY, the Golden Master won’t help.
A somewhat more timely option might be to create a custom rating list the night before your event for your state and maybe the surrounding states. Those files are created from the internal database, so they’re current as of the point in time when they’re created.
The pairing programs don’t currently have an option to load such a file, though.
It wouldn’t take much to convert it to work as a Club List for Swiss-Sys though. But if you just want to verify USCF Expiration then simply load it into Excel or Open Calc and use the find feature. You could even open it with NotePad if you wanted.
Is why I so love my handy-dandy 3G wireless stick! Not much larger than a USB storage device, plugs into a USB port and, if you get phone reception, you get Internet access. Gotta love the 21st Century. 8^)
We got an email over the weekend from a TD who had a player show up claiming that he had just paid for a membership online but didn’t have an ID or any other proof in hand. (Someone who joins online and gives us an email address should receive two emails within a few minutes, one for the credit card charge and one confirming the ID, expiration date and PIN.)
I could not find any recent membership transactions in a similar name, and told the TD that. I looked for first and last names in our database that were no more than two characters different from the name the TD gave me, which was not a very common one.
I’m not sure what the TD did at that point.
I may put together a tool on TD/A to do ‘near match’ searches similar to the one I did.
Of course that still won’t help if the guy says his name is Bob Jones and what we have is Robert Jones.
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