I recently put together my first Swiss, and passed out flyers at local scholastic clubs at public libraries and a local scholastic quad which drew >200. The first week has passed and I have only received one entry; I need 20 to pull even and I’m positive more will come as the week of the tournament nears and the price goes up; but I was wondering if it was normal for very few entries to come in the first week.
My experience has been that most chessplayers wait until the last minute to send in their entries. Many will expect you to give them the advance entry rate even if it is several days after the deadline.
My tournament two weeks ago had about 85 players in it. Over half sent in their registration in the last week before the deadline. (This event, which is part of a larger state-wide festival, doesn’t offer onsite registration.)
Let’s assume your advance entry rate is $25.
You may want to charge $30 for phone entries and $40 onsite.
I’ve seen tournaments where a third of the entries, especially experts and masters, are quite willing to pay the $40 onsite, even if they’re travelling over 100 miles to get to the tournament.
I guess they just don’t make up their mind to play until the morning of the event.
However, let me ask a not-quite hypothetical question.
Suppose the USCF gave you a free online tournament life announcment page which included the ability for players to register for the event online, including paying their entry fees via credit card. (For the time being don’t get hung up on how the money gets to you.)
What would you be willing to have the USCF charge you for processing the registration and e-mailing it to you or making it available for download direct into something WinTD or SwissSys can use?
(Keep in mind that If the USCF is processing the entry fee, there would be charge card fees to cover, probably 2-3% of the amount charged.)
It is not especially difficult to set up on-line credit card entries. What you are really offering here is to provide some basic HTML design services. This would relieve the organizer of having to find a domain and create a page, at the cost of putting a lot of the entries completely beyond his control. I wouldn’t even consider it unless the USCF ran such a program with no complaints for a year or more. Of course, then we run into a chicken-and-egg problem.
As a possible point of interest, my experience has been that about half of the advance entries come in on line if the option is available. Also, the percentage of advance entries goes up to about 75-25 (instead of the usual 60-40), a significant point when designing a budget for your tournament. What seems to be happening is that the guys who used to wait until the last minute and enter at the door, are waiting until the night before and entering on line.
John Hillery wrote:
You’re right that setting up to handle online credit cards isn’t that hard, but I wonder how many TD’s or affiliates have that capability today?
The online TLA directory is already in the testing stage for those affiliates who have signed up for access to the TD/Affiliate Support area.
As of Friday, there were about 35 affiliates and 70 TD’s signed up for the TD/Affiliate Support Area. As I write this (11:30PM Saturday evening), in the last two hours two TD’s have sent in memberships, presumably from events they held today. Those memberships have been processed and should be out on MSA soon if they aren’t out there already. (We upload data to MSA every 2 hours during the day and every 4-6 hours during the evening and overnight.)
In 2003 the USCF rated around 8000 events. Fewer than 2000 of them were advertised in Chess Life. There were 20 rated events held in Nebraska, but I doubt that more than 5 of them were in Chess Life.
If we can offer affiliates the ability to enter TLA’s for online display quickly and without cost, perhaps we can get as many as 75% of the events listed.
And if we can get the majority of the events open to the public (excluding invitationals and things like in-school scholastic events) listed, then we can think about doing other things with that database of information.
For example, we have sent new membership cards to around 125 people living in Los Angeles in the last few months. What if in addition to sending those members a new card we were able to list a few upcoming events in the area? Do you think that’d help turnout at any of those events?
If it only costs a few minutes to key in the TLA information and brings in even one additional player, it’s probably time well spent.
Handling registrations for events organized by USCF affiliates is actually something of an afterthought here. I’m really more interested in getting TLAs online for most events, but once people can find the event, it seems likely that the next question they’ll ask is ‘How do I enter online?’
I think the effect would be slight, though not zero. Most of those non-TLA tournaments are things like small weeknight club events. No one is going to travel from Long Beach to Canoga Park for one of those, even though both are technically “in the Los Angeles area.” Of course, it’s hard to argue that any publicity is bad – a local club would be delighted if if got three or four more players from a USCF referral. The risk is that “real” tournaments might be swamped down to noise level.
The point I originally made, however, was that having the USCF process entries is a bad idea. I can argue this either from practice (having directed a couple of U.S. Opens), or from theory. The time to realize this is before the USCF converts time and money into aggravation.
What does this mean?
I thought it was fairly obvious. If you send a new member a list of ten tournaments in his area (similar to a TLA page from Chess Life), there is at least some chance that he will play in one. If you send him a list of 100 tournaments, most of which are small club events in remote areas, he won’t be able to find the ones that matter – he will probably treat the list like the twenty or so spam mailings I just spent thirty seconds deleting.
John, you obviously haven’t looked at a membership card mailing recently. There wouldn’t be space on it for more than a handful of upcoming events.
How we might decide which events to include has not yet been determined.
One possibility would be to look at the zip code of the event (which will be part of the TLA when entered online) and the zip code of the member and list those events that are closest to the member.
True. The last time I got a new card was 1984.
I’m not arguing that this is a bad idea per se (unlike the business of taking on-line entries), but it goes to the problem of centralization. Things like this should be done locally to the greatest extent possible, because there is no way someone in New Windsor can have a good grasp of the situation on the ground a thousand miles away. Case in point: the ZIP code map of Los Angeles is a crazy-quilt, with almost no continuity – 90045 is near the airport, 90046 is in Hollywood twenty miles away.
It sounds very attractive, but in actuality, like someone already said, it is not that hard to set up a script to take credit card entries myself; many local TDs do it already and very efficiently at that, too. The only reason that I’ll stick with checks and cash is that I’m not 18 yet, and don’t have my own credit card (much to the relief of my parents)
John, you can get latitude and longitutde data by zip code. That means it’s possible to sort out the tournaments in the nearest zip codes. It isn’t perfect, but it will separate out the ones that are 4-5 miles away from the ones that are 20-30 miles away.
You are still missing the point. The ZIP code containing Hollywood, for example, is fairly close to North Hollywood. The longitude and latitude will not tell you that there’s a mountain range (well, some pretty high foothills) between them. USC is in the middle of Watts, but there’s not a lot of cross traffic. I’m not saying that an idea like this will do harm, or even that it won’t do some good. It just won’t work very well. No amount of technological gimcrackery can substitute for personal experience.