Hi there. I’m fairly new to USCF rated chess (currently playing in my first ongoing tournament, so no rating yet), and I’m a member of a collegiate club (not the same club as the one hosting the tournament I’m in). Our college club is considering starting to host rated tournaments and I was hoping to get some advice on how best to proceed.
Our situation is this: we currently have two casual game days per week, at which about 20-30 people show up (5-10 die-hard regulars, with additional “revolving” participants), and the club roster is somewhere around 100 members. We have easy access to space on campus, so could reserve a room for a week night meeting for a few hours at no cost.
A handful of our members (5-10) have USCF ratings (mostly obtained from playing at the club in our neighboring city which hosts weekly tournament games - but many of the students don’t have cars and can’t make it to those games).
Presumably, one of these members could become a “Club TD” and could start running tournaments, correct?
I think this would probably be a popular idea, so we’d likely have a situation where for the first tournament, we might have 20 people show up, only 3-5 of whom have a rating. How big of an issue is this?
I’d consider approaching the TD of our neighboring club to assist with our first few attempts, but I’d assume he already has enough going on running his own club events… However, we might at least be able to entice some of the club members to join us so we’d have more rated players involved.
I’d appreciate any advice you could offer on how to get started in this situation.
A few things. First, is the college club a USCF affiliate? Second, whoever decides to become a TD, and I recommend more than one of you to spread out the workload and also not put the TD in the awkward position of having to rule on his own game, can go onto TD affiliate and search for the local area TDs. There is a way to search for TDs within 150 miles of your ZIP code, and they are in order by distance. Many of them have contact information listed, so you can write or call a few of the closest and see if they would be interested in helping out.
A dirty little secret is that nobody is unrated in the USCF computer. Someone with no other experience is rated at 50*(years old) up to age 26 based on zero games. Fractional years count here, and anyone who is at least 26 is rated 1300/0. Thus, tournaments with the vast majority or even all of the players unrated aren’t a problem because the system does have a place to start. In fact, many large tournaments have sections that only allow unrated players to enter.
A final issue is pairing software. The club should probably purchase either WinTD or SwissSys for the chief TD. Tim Just has some videos here http://the80-20td.com/ that are a good introduction to both the USCF system and these programs. I’d recommend that all the TDs get familiar with whichever product you decide to use.
Yes, any current USCF member can become a club TD and direct small tournaments. (They should have access to a copy of the USCF rulebook, of course.) You will also need a USCF affiliate to sponsor your events. Pairing software makes the job easier (especially doing tie-breaks), but a small Swiss isn’t that hard to run and Round Robin events are even easier, because the pairings are pre-detemined.
As Alex alluded to, the ratings formula has several procedures for coming up with an estimated rating for any new players, so we can rate an event even if none of the players have played in any previous USCF rated events, The more players with ratings there are in your tournament, the more accurate the post-event ratings will be for the first-time players.
Bringing in an experienced TD for your first few events is a good suggestion, that way the TD can also help train any new Club TDs. (And it is a VERY good idea to have more than one TD, so you don’t burn the guy out!)
Do some thinking about how to promote your event, I think that’s just as important as having trained TDs.
If you can’t get an experienced TD to come for the first few events (due to time commitments or TD fee costs) then you might be able to create in-house experienced TDs by volunteering at the nearby events run by experienced TDs (might require car-pooling). Also, you can run non-rated tournaments using USCF rules and pairings to give your TDs experience before doing their first rated event.
You can be a Club-level TD for three years before you must take a TD test. You can take a test earlier and some Club TDs take the test to move up to the Local level within only a month or three of first becoming a Club TD. As a Club TD you are fine being the chief TD of events expecting up to 50 players (60 if you have a computer and a TD assistant).
Note that the expected number is the applicable one, not the actual number. If a tournament unexpectedly gets all 100 people on the roster when the normal expectation is only 30, it can still have a Club TD chief. On the other hand, if you give a based-on-100 prize fund and plan to run it with a Club TD chief then you have problems since either you expected more players than a Club TD should be the chief of or you are listing way more players than expected just to inflate the based-on dollar amount.
Start small. Run a Quad tournament. It does not necessarily have to be rated, but you can have rated and unrated section. This will help you to get your feet wet when learning to direct tournaments. It will also help you to begin building a reputation for running quality events. This also helps to spread the news about a new site for tournament play and other chess activities.
Make sure you have flyers for the event and future events to post and give to players. Ask local businesses, chess clubs, public libraries if you can leave some flyers. Offer a discount if the person brings the flyer to your tournament. Use social media to publicize your events. As you grow, build a club website and update it frequently. Get in contact with clubs from other colleges and universities. Find out what they are doing. Think about holding an interschool match, either by going to another school or doing it online.
It is important that your school knows what you are doing, and what limitations they might have on allowing people on campus. Establish a good relationship with activity coordinators, management of the building, and school security. They can help you or be a nightmare if things do not go as expected.
At one of the first collegiate events we held, aeons ago when dinosaurs still ruled the earth, we had pizza and refreshments available. I don’t know many college chess players who will not be attracted by the aroma of pizza.
First first things first: Welcome to the Forums (and the USCF!) You’re in the right place to get a lot of advice, and hopefully none of it too contradictory! {Aside: Your first post (1) and my 1,111th. Hmm… I’d take that as a good omen if I believed in the Omen, but I don’t because that movie was too scary.}
You have a base which is probably larger than the average club. Yes. A Club TD can start running tournaments. (As above, a TD can run an event when an affiliate has granted them access to submit results or release them for the affiliate to submit.) Generally the Club TD either needs to know how to pair manually for small tournaments, or you need to have pairing software that can do it for you (and know how to run it.)
Since you’re in California (I knoweth not where since your first event hasn’t been rated yet,) I’d strongly bet that there may already be Tournament Directors who are local to your area. Most of us are very willing to help a new club or affiliate to develop a tournament program (i.e. run a first event for the affiliate and help a new Club TD begin to understand the panoply of stuff there is to know.)
If you want to post or PM me your location I’d be happy to try and find some names for you using the fun tools TDs have to find other TDs. Never tried that before, so I might fail. But oh, well.
It isn’t an issue. Mr. Nolan and the servers have ways of making ratings magic happen. The bigger thing to understand is getting the players to understand their need to be USCF members to participate.
My most humble opinion: A really good club is one that doesn’t feel threatened by the offer of having more chess in town. Instead, they’ll go, “Holy cow! We got someone in the college who’s interested in doing stuff there. Think of a ‘college vs. townies’ match potentital! Someplace else we can go to and get some rated play at! Wow!” I dream of this occurring here, and would bust my tail to help someone get started at either our community college or either of our two main universities in the city.
In fact, not being sure of your college’s activity rules, but would that local club be willing to lend themselves to you as a ‘university chapter’ of their club (in terms of startup help / utilizing their affiliation for tournaments that ‘your’ directors run / etc?)
Just a thought.
Got to read the thread a little closer, someone may have mentioned it, but there is supposed to be someone in the USCF office you can contact as well as contacts on the Clubs committee, too. But keep posting here… we’ll kibitz you to death.
Thanks for the replies everyone! I appreciate the support and information.
Our current plan is to become a USCF affiliate and have a couple of our members become Club TDs, and reach out to the local clubs/TDs for mentorship and assistance. Meanwhile, we’ll probably start organizing some unofficial tournaments to get used to how they work, get the scoring/pairing down, learn the software, etc. It’s very easy to get space from the University as long as money is not changing hands, but if we ever start charging fees and/or offering prizes, things become more complex (not restrictively so, but it’s just one more thing to deal with). So for now we’ll keep it small and simple and slowly build from there.
The club in question is the UC Davis chess club, and the Sacramento Chess Club is our neighboring club (where I’ve started playing recently and a few other members have been more regularly for a longer while). I’ll be back there this Tuesday so I’ll inquire about getting some assistance or mentorship/advice, etc…
Thanks again for the help, and I’m sure I’ll be back with more questions as the process continues!
This surprises me a bit. When I ran the club at the University of Oklahoma, there were no issues regarding money. If you want to be open to the community, I’d think you’d need some way of charging money at least to non-students.
Hi Alex - it’s certainly not prohibited to charge/collect money. It’s just that doing so falls under the “fundraising” category so there are additional forms to fill out, hoops to jump through, etc… I’m sure it won’t be an issue when the time comes, but for now we’ll start simple with some free, informal events - then we can progress to dealing with the university bureaucracy.
Reviving this thread to ask for more advice from the helpful forum members!
We’re now setup as an affiliate and last night we held an informal tournament (ie: non-rated) - we had a 4-person round robin section and a 6 person swiss. It went very well and everyone had lots of fun. We’re looking forward to running our first official tournament in a few weeks.
So, my question is: we have a player visiting from Kazakhstan (he’ll be here as an exchange student for the year). He has a FIDE rating of around 1900, but is not a USCF member yet. Once he signs up for USCF membership, assuming his first tournament is one of ours, how do we handle his FIDE rating? Is he treated as unrated for his first USCF tournament or does he already have a USCF rating based on his current FIDE rating?
For pairing and prize purposes, you could ask 10 organizers that question and get 10 different answers in terms of what’s ‘fair’ as far as that FIDE rated player is concerned.
As far as rating the event is concerned, he will get a provisional rating based on his FIDE rating, so be sure to give us his FIDE ID. (The current conversion formula is in the rating system white paper on Mark Glickman’s website.)
28D gives an old conversion formula for FIDE to USCF. A 1900 converts to (method 1) 1950 or (method 2) 2067 or (method 3) 2000. If memory serves correctly, method 2 is has more of a tendency to overstate ratings than 1 or 3. Method 3 seems fairly common. I could not quickly find the newest version of the conversion formula.
When entering the USCF membership, include the FIDE ID number and let the USCF computers take care of the rating.
Assuming no math errors, that’s correct. And if the FIDE rating is 2150 or less, it is a provisional rating based on 5 games, if the FIDE rating is above 2150, it is a provisional rating based on 10 games.
But whether TDs want to use that rating for pairing and prize purposes is a separate issue.
As an anecdote, here is my USCF vs. FIDE published regular rating data since the time that USCF went to monthly published ratings. For a US player, who is not a pro, I am fairly active in FIDE rating events, with about two thirds of my ~70 USCF regular rated games per year also being FIDE rated.
I believe there is an artificial reason why my USCF/FIDE rating delta was low in 2007-2010: my FIDE rating was inflated due to certain FIDE-rated events that I favored (intentionally left vague). As I play less and less in those events, my FIDE rating is now more accurate, and the delta has been steadily increasing, but now it has shot past the 65 points predicted by the conversion formula. Maybe it’s the noise, and the delta will go back down or at least stabilize. Though, I have also noticed that many up-and-coming juniors who used to not have FIDE rating at the level they are at, now do have it, but it’s woefully lagging. Anecdotally, the USCF/FIDE rating delta for these juniors is in 150-200 point range. If the opportunities to get FIDE rating for the US players continue to increase (not a given, considering arbiter fees and player registrations proposals), we might see the USCF/FIDE rating delta getting bigger.
For what it’s worth, here are the two charts that Mark Glickman, the Ratings Committee chair, prepared before the FIDE-to-USCF conversion formulas were modified last September:
The youth conversion information is only used for making FIDE adjustments from youth events, like the World Youth Championships.
I didn’t create the graphs, those came from Mark Glickman. but I’m sure they take into account the extent of the deviation from the line, not just a simple ‘50% on one side, 50% on the other’.
Also, keep in mind that the purpose of the FIDE-to-USCF conversion formula is to give us a reasonable starting point for a FIDE rated player’s initial USCF event, and as such it is just a first-order approximation of his USCF rating.
{Aside: Your first post (1) and my 1,111th. Hmm… I’d take that as a good omen if I believed in the Omen, but I don’t because that movie was too scary.}
