I have played in a Thursday night chess club for several years now, but the format used there does not allow for norms. In order to have opportunities for norms I participate in some additional tournaments on Saturdays.
USCF can create the titles, but meaning depends on the “market” and each individual player’s tastes.
If tournaments start to have class-sections based on titles rather than rating, then the market has made a statement. I expect pairings will continue to be done by rating rather than title.
Is your rating meaningful? Most people seem to think their rating is meaningful to them, but only because that is what they choose to care about. As the title system becomes more mature, more people may care about them too.
I agree with Hal Terrie’s earlier comment about the title names. We chose “serious” names, and in fact they are like the old Soviet system which most people respect.
I suppose Chess is the one area where it makes a certain amount of sense to take the Soviet Union seriously.
I must confess that as I tried to come up with names I liked better, I never came up with anything that didn’t sound fairly stupid, like something out of a D&D game. I liked “Journeyman”, but when I looked up the precise meaning, it didn’t seem to fit after all. So, I guess “Category 3” will have to do. It still seems awfully bland.
Once Victory Points start, organizers will have yet another option for sections and/or prizes.
blank stare
Here’s the current document on Victory Points from the Board, the concept was approved by the Board at their November meeting.
This is a relatively simple cumulative system to coexist with ratings and titles. It will have no effect on either, but will offer the prospect of increased credit to all players, even those who are declining. It will reward not only activity and success, but also aggressive play (no credit for draws) and play at slower time controls. And though it will not show current strength, most with high point totals will be high rated players. Here is how it will work:
WIN OVER 1001-1200 1/8 POINT
WIN OVER 1201-1400 1/4 POINT
WIN OVER 1401-1600 1/2 POINT
WIN OVER 1601-1800 1 POINT
WIN OVER 1801-2000 2 POINTS
WIN OVER 2001-2200 4 POINTS
WIN OVER 2201-2400 8 POINTS
WIN OVER 2401-2600 16 POINTS
WIN OVER 2600/ABOVE 32 POINTS
Victory Points are available only in events slower than G/60.
Fractional points are available only to players who have less than 100 lifetime victory points. Any excess fractional points in an event are rounded down, for example, a player with 100 or more points who scores two half points in an event would get one point, but three half points would also get one point, and a single half point would get zero.
Note that players floored at the class minimum would count as the class below for generating Victory Points.
What might a player get for Victory Points? To start with, we should publish lists on occasion in Chess Life, and more often and in more detail on the web, lifetime totals and annual totals for the national Victory Points leaders, the leaders who live in each state, the most Victory Points scored in each state (not the same thing), and there could be other categories such as largest number of states in which the player scored at least 5 or 10 or 20 Victory Points playing in each state, etc. There would be special awards for players with 1000 or 10,000 or whatever Victory Points in a year or lifetime. We don’t need to decide now what these awards will be called, but it wouldn’t be the same name as anything in the rating system or title system.
Another possible use for Victory Points is to award class prizes, but such prizes should be for those in the class who have over a certain total, not under it . Once we see how many players in each class have how many lifetime Victory Points, organizers could offer class prizes to players in each class who have a certain minimum number of points (it should be a number no more than half the players in the section are likely to have). Such class prizes will favor the older players, who tend to be winning little now, and probably even more so than titles. Players may want Victory Points not only for the recognition, but also the added prize eligibility.
The Victory Point system should do some important things better than titles or ratings:
a. Even most declining players can easily add to their total.
b. No one, after reaching a goal, should feel that further progress is impossible.
c. Most players will see progress immediately online after each tournament.
d. The point system format is suitable for simple promotional breakdowns by state, year, age, etc. or rivalries between club or team members.
e. Rewards aggressive play.
f. Encourages play at relatively slow time controls, which is good for the development of young players.
g. Credits available even in short events such as quads and team matches, or for house players.
h. Allows a new type of class prize, one limited to players in a class who have scored a certain minimum number of Victory Points. The offering of such prizes would likely increase opportunity for players who are not improving, and promote activity and the Victory Point system. This idea can also be tried with titles. In both cases, a higher point total or title should mean greater, not less, eligibility for class prizes. For example, if a tournament offers a number of Under 1800 prizes, one of them might be restricted to players under 1800 who have a certain minimum victory point total or minimum title.
How far back are we going to go to determine these “victory points”?
I am not sure that just “aggressive play” will be rewarded. Sitzfleisch, chess blindness of one’s opponents, and affluence may also boost totals. 
I do like that there are many other ways to slice up the statistics, but there need to be some examples for TD’s and organizers to examine before they add/change prizes. BTW will these points be posted somewhere in the murky bowels of the website or in the individual MSA records?
I don’t think there are any plans to compute them retroactively.
As to where they will show show up (as well as when), that isn’t finalized yet.
If they are not going to be cpmputed retroactively, how does that square with the idea of “lifetime” victory points? The EB should have been clearer in its directive. It all sounds like a lot of work with very few people paying attention to it. Most players look only at their rating.
Am I the only one who sees the potential for geographical bias in this concept? Awarding points only for slow time controls means that most one-day tournaments will not count. Most one-day tournaments’ not counting means that points will overwhelmingly be awarded in multi-day tournaments. This will favor players in a few large metropolitan areas where multi-day tournaments are held regularly, and in particular it will favor players who reside in those areas and consequently don’t have to pay through the nose for hotel rooms. It will decidedly disfavor players who have to travel more than a couple of hours for tournament activity, as well as players who can’t afford the frequently steep entry fees of multi-day hotel tournaments.
There’s also, dare I mention it, a class bias: Particularly in today’s economic climate, players in non-professional occupations may have a hard time getting two or more days off work in a row, even on weekends.
I’d hypothesize that if you surveyed people who play mostly or exclusively in single-day events, most of them would tell you that it’s a matter of convenience, not impatience. I don’t think that if this proposal passes, you’ll see a large-scale shift toward slower time controls. I think you might see a minuscule shift toward single-day quad events over single-day Swiss events, or toward club tournaments spread over several weeks rather than condensed into a single day, but mostly what you’ll see is that all your high-point-scoring players live in the same handful of locales where CCA does most of its business. I’ll leave it to others to speculate on whether that might be why this VP proposal is limited to slower time controls.
There are a number of details in the VP system that are likely to be troublesome.
For example, what we have done with JGP (which is also [mostly] limited to games slower than G/60) is to use regular-rated-only events as a proxy for ‘slower than G/60’.
However, because of the time control rules that were passed in 2009, a time control such as G/15 + 20 seconds delay is regular-rated-only.
So, is such an event eligible for JGP or VP?
These are all attempts to boost participation, but nothing boosts participation more than $$$.
Poker is the great example of this, which is why many good players at other games, including chess, have been siphoned off into the poker tank.
This is the conventional wisdom. However, I’m not sure if it’s true. Last weekend I played in a tournament with 120 participants, and $0.00 in cash prizes. It was not the largest tournament in Michigan all year, but it was very close.
While cash prizes draw many players, they also repel many players. Because they are so ubiquitous in the Chess world, anyone who doesn’t like them drops out entirely, and those who do not drop out entirely are people who like cash prizes, so large prizes draw many entries. For me, cash prizes are a distinct disincentive to attend a tournament. I know my entry fee, which is overly high, is being used to subsidize a prize.
I think category titles have an opportunity to slowly create a change in the cash only culture, possibly. If so, they have to be recognized one way or another. How to do that is problematic in the Chess world, though. We don’t wear uniforms where we can wear rank badges, the way boy scouts or marshal artists wear their badges or belts. Serious suggestion, though. Create an official “insignia”, a logo, something that can be put on a patch or a picture, for each of the titles, and trademark them. Then, allow their use by people with that title, such as appearing on their facebook page, or on a patch on their tourney bag, or in the title page of their blog. It sounds a bit silly, but it could work. I got the idea when I got something similar after I became a “microsoft Certified Solution Devloper”.
If it’s good enough for my resume, it’s good enough for a blog.
I’m a little late to this discussion, but I think if you want people to take the category titles seriously, it has to come with something tangible. I like the idea, but I’d be much more excited about it if I knew I could even get a simple form letter from the USCF acknowledging the title earned.
The entire chess world favors people who live in or near metro areas. There’s not much that can be done about it. I just moved away from remote North Dakota, and for years I tried to find a way to get to any rated tournament at all, but the nearest one was six hours away and the timing just never worked.
I see this complaint a lot. There’s an easy solution. Host one.
It wasn’t so much a complaint, it was just a reality. Someone who has never played in a rated tournament isn’t going to feel comfortable trying to host one. But maybe I should have tried 
It’s not just the chess world. See any NFL or NBA teams in North Dakota?
It’s not something that would have occured to most people, but if you were to examine my history, you would see that my first tournament as a TD occurred before my first tournament as a player.
To be fair, the thought didn’t occur to me either. I was complaining about tournaments in my area (specifically about them being too expensive) and someone made a similar suggestion to me, and guided me in the process of how to become a club TD and hold a tournament.
Now I have a bit more experience, both as player and TD, and I can do a better job, but to anyone upset that they can’t find tournaments in their area, it really is easy to become a TD and host one.
Then the complaint will be finding players in their area.
It seems to me that the remote-rural player of yesteryear would have found solace in correspondence chess.