I’m a new local TD and first time poster. Hope I’m in the right place and doing it right.
I want to hold a tournament that would have a just one round a month for several months. I was going to just use the current rating supplement for the first round of the tournament, but a more experienced TD raised the question of what rating I would use so I thought I should get some advice. Any reason that wouldn’t work.
My bigger question is about rating the event. Am I going to have problem when I submit for rating if it starts in May and ends in August? What if a player is current with USCF when he plays the May round but he doesn’t play in anymore rounds and his membership expires before the tournament is over and rated?
Hi, and congratulations on becoming a local TD. This is just the place to ask the questions you have.
Regardless of the duration of the tournament, the official rating at the start of the event is the one that should be used for pairing and prize purposes. You could announce in advance that you were using a different rating, but this is very unusual.
There are multi-week and multi-month events held every year throughout the US. So that, in and of itself, is fine. USCF recommends submitting separate rating reports for events that will last longer than six weeks or so. It sounds like this will be a four-month event, so I would submit a rating report each month after that month’s round is one.
When you take entries for the event, I would definitely recommend that each player has USCF membership that is current through the end of the event. If you do that, you’ll avoid the problem of submitting the event with expired membership. In practice, of course, you can take their entry if they expire before the end of the tournament, but you’ll have to get them current before you can submit the event - which may end up costing you extra money, at least initially.
If you’re doing this as a one-report-a-month event for rating purposes, you could, for example, let someone sign up who expires in June, and tell them that they have to renew their membership before the July round if they want to continue playing.
Another option is to submit the report every other month. The time duration of each pair of rounds would likely be either 29 or 36 days, which is easily within the six week guideline.
An advantage of monthly submissions is that the issue of memberships lapsing during the event is much easier to react to. You might need to handle questions about whether or not each round is simply a disguised group of matches.
Note that bonus points are calculated for four-round events and splitting it into four one-round events or two two-round events would eliminate bonus point possibilities.
There are three reasons behind the recommendation that long events be reported every six weeks or so:
If there are players who are active in other events, their gains and losses from your event will be reflected in their ratings for those other events.
If there are players whose ratings are changing a lot (usually young players who are learning rapidly), then their opponents will have a more current and thus more accurate rating used when computing the ratings from your event.
Players like to see the impact their recent games have on their published ratings.
But if none of your players are active in other events and their ratings/skill level is not changing much, and if your players don’t care when the games are rated and posted on MSA, then there’s no urgent reason to submit your event in several pieces.
From a more practical/mechanical point of view, when your event is submitted for rating, we will check to see if all of the players are current members as of the ending date of the section. If there are players who dropped out several months ago, you will either have to pay some kind of membership or fee for them or contact the office and request a membership exception for them, explaining the circumstances. This will delay when your event can be rated.
Splitting it into four one-round events or two two-round events will prevent players from being eligible for bonus points and norms since bonus points requires a minimum of 3 rounds in an event and norms require at least 4 rounds in an event.