As a club level director, i was asked to run a small scholastic tournament last weekend with about 40 kids. No problem…
Well within the last week, another 130 joined up and I ran a 170 player tournament last saturday.
Though it felt like a nightmare of being forced to work at Chucky Cheese, the tournament went quite well, other than the 100 new memberships to process over the next week.
What does USCF do in this event? I know that a club director can only host tournaments up to a certain size, but this happen to be out of my control and it was not possible to find a Local or Senior level director in time.
Actually, what the TD regulations state is that TD are only permitted to run events that can be reasonably expected to draw under a designated number of players, the number varying based on the level of TD certification.
If an event exceeds expectations, that’s not going to cause the event to become non-ratable, though if there is enough time additional TDs should probably be brought in to help handle the workload. With that many players the tasks of looking up all the players and checking their rating and membership status can get onerous, and all the other parts of the TD’s workload will increase at least proportionally if not exponentially.
I HIGHLY recommend using the online system to handle that many memberships. There’s an Excel spreadsheet you can download so that you can do them offline.
The Tournament Director Enforcement Squad will be showing up at your door with a nice collection of rubber hoses and chains and will procede to beat you into submission for the massive infraction. They will then take pictures of your broken body and mail them to all other local TD’s as a warning to not exceed our tournament skill level.
I recommend moving to a non-extradition treaty 3rd world country and changing your name. Don’t forget to sever all ties with friends and family!
Working with the paper work of so many players, most of them being so new can be a problem for any director. Working with the memberships, with as many as 100 new players is a hard task. There is two major choices you can do, work on the membership till all the memberships are in working order. After that send in the tournament in whole with 170 players. Since the tournament has sections, break up the tournament. If you have five sections, and one section has all the memberships current: send it in online as a free standing tournament.
There are directors that object to this idea, but a section on its’ own has nothing to do with the other sections. If one section memberships are current, why not send it in as a free standing tournament. If the section has 30 players, that would bump down the problem from 170 players to 150 players.
If you send in a tournament with 170 players, one membership problem will stop the tournament from being rated. If you have a problem with a membership in a section of 20 players, and the other sections memberships are current and ready to be rated. Than your holding up 150 players getting there rating.
No one was happy, the tournament was awful; thinderchicken is a drunken Hold’em player disguised as a TD, who quotes Doug verbatim when handing out rulings
