In light of the spread of COVID-19, our chess club is considering suspending operations until the situation is clarified and it appears (relatively) safe to invite people to congregate at our venue. Independently of our own preference, this is a decision that ultimately may also be imposed on us by the venue’s owner.
Just as we were starting to tackle these issues, on Thursday we received an invitation from Chess.com to organize an online version of our club on their website. However, the last paragraph in Chess.com’s e-mail advertisement cautions that
Does US Chess (USCF) have any plans to enable Affiliates and/or TDs to organize and run tournaments online via Chess.com (or any other online service)?
If we somehow got our club members to join an online version of the club created on Chess.com (with all the appropriate player authentications) and we were to then enter the results of an online event on SwissSys, would this rating report be acceptable to US Chess?
I’m sure we aren’t the only ones currently wondering about these possibilities.
Thanks in advance for any information or insights you might provide.
Jorge Amador
President, Chaturanga Chess Club
Hatboro, Pennsylvania
How do you plan to stop cheating through computer assistance? Heck, how would you stop players from having human assistance during the games? Would you mind if the players are using opening books while they play? Will you have a certified TD by the side of everyone who is playing to ensure that the rules are followed? OTB is hard enough to manage. Online play is the wild West by comparison.
Presumably, the same methods would be used (whatever they might be) that US Chess uses for their own events on Chess.com that apparently they already rate. Put questions of that sort to US Chess, not me. I have learned of this possibility (USCF-rated online play) only this week and am feeling my way around the idea myself.
Looking more closely at the FAQ for the US Chess club on Chess.com, there is the following item in the Ratings section:
This week’s e-mail ad from Chess.com began with the following paragraphs:
One can understand how the impression was given that “normal” USCF-rated play was already possible (i.e., having the effect of moving face-to-face club activities online), but the details on the website seem to suggest that it is premature to think this.
Any actual information or experience with what Chess.com is describing above will be appreciated.
I have been told that chess.com has pretty good mechanisms for detecting computer assistance. The other two forms of outside assistance (opening books or human assistance) might be harder to police. I believe most online chess is either blitz (where physical opening books are impractical to use) or correspondence (where the use of such books is allowed), so this hasn’t really been an issue. However, at normal tournament time controls, it might be an issue. I have avoided online chess because I can’t be sure who I’m playing or what sort of assistance they might be using. I avoid correspondence chess for the same reasons. I want to play one on one with another person, not his computer or his library of opening books or his master-strength friend. I plan on abstaining from chess until regular over-the-board tournaments are again practical and common.
Just to amplify on this a bit, if you look up any U.S. Chess member using “Player/Rating Lookup” (under Ratings at the bottom of the uschess.org home page), and look at that player’s General tab, you will see five ratings listed for each player:
If a player has played in all three (regular, quick, and blitz) types of tournaments OTB (over-the-board), but has never played online, they will have ratings in the first three categories, but will be listed as Unrated in the two online categories.
So, if you were to run a tournament online, it would have to be either quick-rated (G/26 inc/3 or faster) or blitz-rated (G/8 inc/2 or faster), and would not affect any of the player’s three OTB ratings. Instead, they would end up with a shiny new Online Quick Rating or Online Blitz Rating, as the case may be.
(I’ll let somebody else nitpick the exact time control requirements, if they wish. I’m just trying to explain the general idea.)
I think affiliates have to be pre-approved to run online-quick and online-blitz events, as the online submission process doesn’t offer online-quick or online-blitz options. (ICC and Chess.com submit their crosstables via email.)
As only ICC and chess.com have shown any interest in this so far, and both of those had existing online chess capabilities, I’m not sure what an affiliate would have to do to get approved. This probably means showing that they have the ability to host those events and provide reasonable safeguards over them, including checking that the members are who they say they are and are current US Chess members.
It would seem to make more sense to approach ICC or chess.com and see if they’d host your events.
Thanks to all for your thoughts and info, I’m glad I asked.
If it turns out we need to suspend OTB operations for more than four weeks, then we’ll look into the possibility of hosting online events even if they’re not for OTB ratings, just to maintain a presence in the minds of club members and friends.
I recommend a careful reading of chapter 10 (Internet Chess) of the Official Rules of Chess.
Games run over the internet may be rated under an over-the-board rating system provided the rules in chapter 10 (and the rest of the rules in the Official Rules of Chess are followed). For example, the US Amateur Team Playoff has been run online for some years now.
Note carefully that the rules require a certified assistant TD be available at every playing site and that the TD be able to “witness (computer screens visible, and actions of the players monitered) each player and game while games are in progress.”
I am pretty sure that both Chess.com and ICC will see a large increase in participation in their online rated events this week. If nothing else, there will be thousands of kids who are out of school. An increase in participation will likely lead to an increase in the number of tournaments held each week (5 on Chess.com and 4 on ICC).
This sounds completely impractical for what you want to do. For example, if 20 players are entered, each playing from their homes, you would need to have assistant TDs present at all 20 homes, which would defeat your purpose.
But that’s only if you want the event rated under the OTB regular ratings. If you want to have it rated only as online quick or online blitz, those requirements don’t exist, but then you’d need a full-blown massive website (like the ones Chess.com and ICC have) that would allow players to enter their moves online, then check the entered moves for legality, etc. – almost certainly not what you had in mind.
In practice, you’d probably need to ask Chess.com or ICC to run the event for you. And who knows what’s involved in that procedure?
The tough part is that there appears currently to be no (practical) way to run a rated tournament for “real” ratings. For better or worse, a lot of players are interested in participating only in events where regular rating points are at stake: attendance at our club is dramatically lower when we’re running a non-rated event than when we’re running a rated one. Even Quick Chess events don’t do all that well for us. The question then would become whether people who play at our club would find it acceptable to play for an “online only” rating. Maybe if we get stuck in our homes for so long that face-to-face play becomes a faint memory…
I might contact the US Chess admins at Chess.com to see if there are plans to do this. (Worth a shot asking, anyway.)
Fear of cheating (via chess engines, etc) is undoubtedly the main reason (or one of many strong reasons) why U.S. Chess does not want to “pollute” regular OTB ratings with unsupervised online events.
It might be possible to place limits on OTB-rated tournaments held online, such as little or no cash prizes and limits on ratings changes from them, just to keep people playing.
Most of the incentives for cheating are financial.
Even in the absence of prizes, one-up-manship incentives also exist because some people like to have a higher rating (for prestige or boasting or being able to charge more for lessons) and some people just like showing they can beat the system. Rating limits would take care of much of the rating increase issue, but that would also reduce the incentive to play US Chess rated in the first place.
The discussion should remain open. If we are able to plug all the holes that people shoot in an idea then it may well be doable.
Years ago I suggested that someone’s rating should not be allowed to cross a threshold (100 or 200 point interval) without having played players over or at least near that threshold. In other words, if you want to be a 2000 player, you need to have played some 2000 players, or at least some 1800 or 1900 players. It isn’t clear that players beating up on inferior talent to increase their ratings is a major issue these days due to the switch to floating point ratings in 2013. But we could place some additional restrictions over online-OTB-rated events.
I believe ICC and Chess.com have measures in place to look for indications of ‘assistance’, such as using chess engines. They might be in the best position to be able to quickly offer OTB-rated games in an online format while we hunker down at home.
Just a question that has nothing to do with your question, but regarding your club attendance. How does your club normally meet? Does it have it’s own building, or do you use donated space, like at a McDonalds, someone’s home, etc.? How long is your club open in a given meet?
Reason I ask, is if you hold regular rated events at your club, they must allow for no more than one game a night, if you meet for only a couple hours, is that right?
Terry, we meet Wednesday nights at a church. The club opens at 7PM and we have no set closing time.
Most of our rated events are one game per night (week) for 4 nights, with a good time control (40/90, 15/30) but sometimes we’ll run Game/30 quads and of course those are 3 rounds per night.
