Unconventional prize methods - Are they legal?

Running Chess Tournaments
1

For reasons that escape me, a lot of players simply won’t play unless there is an opportunity for a cash prize. I run prizeless tournaments, but I am kicking around concepts that might include a cash prize. I’m not a big fan or prizes, though. It just seems like a way of making tournaments more expensive, while giving an opportunity for the best players to take money from the worst.

Nevertheless, the market responds to the prize offers, so I’m thinking about changing my ways. If I do so, though, I will not do it the “standard” way. If I do it, I would want some way that every single player can either have a reasonable chance of winning something, or they could opt out of paying for the prize at all, but still play. In other words, if someone doesn’t feel like giving his money away that day, I will still let him come in to my tournament. So far, I have come up with two possibilities.

The first is a simple “opt in” prize pool. At the time you pay your entry fee, you also pay an optional “prize” fee. At the end of the tournament, prizes are awarded based on standing in the tournament, but only to the players who opted in. For example, the highest finisher who opted in gets 50% of the prize pool. 2nd place gets 30%. 3rd place 20%. All is divided by USCF regulations, with the exception that only those who opted in would be eligible. The actual tournament winner might get nothing.

A second possibility is a “prize raffle”. A portion of the fee goes to the prize pool. You get one raffle ticket for entering the tournament, plus one raffle ticket for each 1/2 point you earn, and maybe some bonus tickets for biggest upset or highets finisher under a particular rating, or age. At the end of the tournament, you draw a ticket and the prize goes to the ticket drawn.

So, there are two questions. First, would these prizes be legal under USCF rules? As I read the rulebook, they would be, so long as they are announced in advance. Second, would the existence of these prizes make you more or less likely to go to the tournaments?

For what it’s worth, these ideas seem silly to me, but then again, prizes for ordinary tournaments seem silly to me, so I have a hard time relating to how people think about prizes. Also, I am thinking of these for very small tournaments, not major championships or large, CCA style, “open” tournaments. I am talking about tournaments in libraries and church basesments where the prize fund would probably be in the neighborhood of twenty bucks.

2

I’ve done prizes in a few different ways. I’ve done chess equipment prizes (books, clocks, dvds, etc), membership prizes (chess center, uscf, icc,), and gift card prizes (best buy, barnes and noble, star bucks) at my chess center. It’s so far been ok. I run 1 cash prize tournament at the chess center and the turn out for that isn’t materially different.

The one that is different is kids tournaments. Parents are telling me it’s difficult for them to motivate their kids if they can’t come home with a trophy. I’m fundamentally against trophies. I still have to experiment on what to do. The kids don’t care for chess equipment prizes or memberships. I haven’t tried gift cards (like toys r us, or others) or college savings bonds, though the latter appeals more to the parents than the kids.

3

I don’t see why they wouldn’t be. In fact I’ve used (a variation of) the former myself, and seen the latter used. In Kansas they had (and probably still have) rules about amateur standing, such that scholastic athletes are ineligible to compete if they have competed for cash prizes. When I ran a tournament in Kansas, I offered a lower entry fee for players who wished to play for trophies only, and thereby preserve their amateur standing. FWIW, none of the players opted for the “trophy only” option.

I was later persuaded that it is a bad idea for players competing in the same section to have different incentives. That is if I’m playing you, and I’m playing for cash but you’re playing only for a trophy, there is more incentive for the game to have an unfair result. I no longer do this. I’d advise separate sections. Your mileage may vary.

Alex Relyea

4

I tried once with “pool prizes”. Players who wanted to could pay an extra $3 to participate in five player pools: the top scorer got $10 and 2nd got $5. The bottom pool or two may have from 4 to 6 players. Any one pool consisted of the participating players with the closest ratings. Any given rating could just as easily be on the bottom of one pool as on the top of another.

It didn’t go over really well, but the players didn’t boycott me later either. With inflation, perhaps a $10 pool EF should go for prizes of $35 and $15.

FWIW

5

This has been tried before. (I assume each prize would be a percentage of the “opt in” prize pool.) What usually happens is, a majority of players opt out of the prize fund. This guts the prize fund, so the prize winners feel cheated and leave with a bad taste in their mouths.

Or, if the prize fund is set at a fixed amount, most players will still opt out, and the organizer will lose his shirt.

Somehow I have a hunch that this would look like an unattractive gimmick to those players playing for prizes.

In most players’ eyes, I think the importance of prizes is directly proportional to the entry fee. In these parts the Evanston Chess Club charges a $5 entry with no prizes, and draws quite well, thank you. It even attracts strong players (Expert and A), perhaps because these tournaments are often divided into multiple sections, and/or because the club sometimes pays a small honorarium to one or two masters in return for their participation.

If the entry fee is $50 or $100 or more, most players will stay away if they don’t feel they have a chance at a prize.

A good compromise would be a $20 entry fee with prizes by score. For a four-rounder the prizes could be:
4.0 $100
3.5 $50
3.0 $25
2.5 $10
This structure will attract strong players (Experts and perhaps Masters), whose presence will in turn attract A players, etc. Players farther down the alphabet will still play because they know they’ll get a crack at some strong opposition.

Bill Smythe

6

I suspected as much. I think most people look at the high entry fee as something they put up with in order to play tournament Chess. Given an option, they decline to participate.

Excellent. That means it can be done. Around here, mine is the only non-scholastic, prizeless, tournament, and I must confess I’m drawing a bit lower than I would like. I was thinking that perhaps some tiny hint of a prize might improve the situation, but I think you are right. Those people who want prizes wouldn’t be impressed, and would be put off by the gimmick. Those people for whom prizes don’t matter, or who actually prefer a tournament unsullied by the quest for cash would be put off by the introduction of something that they didn’t care about in the first place.

I have started offering free entry to category I (that’s roughly class A for those of you who haven’t picked up on the existence of the “category” titles) and above. I did it once just as a gimmick, but I decided to keep it, for a while at least, just because I realized that for the highest level players in a prizeless tourney, there’s really no place to go but down. They can’t win money. They can’t significantly increase their ratings, but if they are the victim of an upset win, they can drop. I decided it was a way of saying thanks to people who showed up to play, even though there was no tangible reward.

7

I think you should just stick with your idea of no cash prizes. You might not get so many top-rated players, who don’t seem to be all that interested in playing chess for fun. (How did chess get so money-grubbing?) But you will get people who just want to play tournament chess for fun at a reasonable cost.Players won’t enjoy a chess tournament with high entry fees if it seems as though the entry fees are going into the organizer’s pocket. If pockets are going to be filled, they will figure their pockets are preferable to the organizer’s pocket. But it will be a different story if it seems to them that the entry fees are just covering the costs.

8

I’m curious about your thoughts on this.

9

Trophies for 1st thru 3rd is one thing - akin to Gold, Silver, and Bronze medals. But we saturate kids with trophies, participation medals, etc. The value and purpose goes away. It’s really a pacifier for kids, parents, and coaches. You can take a picture of little Johnny with the shiny trophy for the parent to show their friends and the coach to post on their website to get more little Johnny’s.

Some parents and some coaches say its a way of boosting morale and hyping the kid up to play, otherwise they’d be doing something else - but then aren’t they doing chess for the wrong reasons. I also believe that it sets up false expectations. Kids play in little pond events, get all these trophies and think they are king of the world, then play in a slightly stronger event and go home with nothing, even though trophies were given out. Then what? You’ve torn the kid down plus his/her parents (and then the parents might end up becoming trophy hunters and pushing their kids for the wrong reasons). Some may say ‘oh it gives them incentive to get better’. Baloney, that’s when Nintendo turns out to be his best friend.

My belief is not to give Johnny a gold star for being able to tie his shoes, his reward is that he won’t trip and fall, or his show won’t come off while running on the playground. YMMV.

10

This could pay off in another way, too. If it attracts an extra A player or two, that will make the tournament more attractive to B players. The presence of more B players will in turn attract C players. Etc. (As you pointed out, nobody likes to be near the top of a prizeless tournament.)

If you just keep doing what you’re doing, players will gradually become more and more aware of your tournaments, and attendance will eventually snowball. It may be a slow snowball, though – more like a single snowball rolling down a gentle hill, not so much like a giant avalanche in the Rockies.

Bill Smythe

11

In MACA scholastic tournaments, we award first, second, and third place trophies in each section. Most of the sections are age- or grade-based, depending on the tournament. In some of the tournaments we have “novice” sections, which are ratings-based. We don’t give “under” prizes based on rating. The trophies are modest in size. (The trophies we give at the state championship tournaments are rather nice, and somewhat larger, but still not enormous.) We give medals to players who were tied for a place-prize but lost on tiebreaks. We also give players medals if they win three out of four points and are not receiving a trophy.

I’ve never heard anybody complain that we don’t give out enough trophies. On the other hand, some people have observed that Massachusetts has lower scholastic participation per capita than a lot of other states. This is true, but I think it is because there aren’t a lot of school chess programs in Massachusetts, rather than because of how many trophies we award.

12

While there is quite a bit of merit to your approach, from a practical aspect, we need
to address the market that exists. Consider youth soccer for example. As commissioner of a U6 division in charge of 45 teams, I know that EVERY child
in this division received a trophy. The same trophy for all. Same for the U8, and
U10 divisions as well. From what I gather, this approach is fairly standard, not
just for soccer, but most kids sports. These are the kids we are competing for.
And quite often, no trophy, no chance.

Rob Jones

13

That’s my hope. We’ll see. Right now, the tourney works, but if we had more players, it would work better. 1000 point rating differences in some of the early round games are not all that bizarre in my tournaments, just because there is a small number of players with a wide range of ratings. (Then again, at my last tournament, there were actually two upsets of more than 1000 points, and 7 upsets of more than 500 points, and in the fifth round of a rated Swiss tournament, there was one game with a 1300 point rating difference. It was a weird day.)

The fear of losing rating points actually shouldn’t drive people away. If you look at how the ELO system works, any ratings points lost in an anomalous loss will be rapidly regained. If it was truly anomalous, it will be a lot easier to gain those points the second time around. However, that’s hard to persuade someone who took a long time to gain 100 points, but who lost it in a day.

14

Interestingly, Tom Martinak and I had a late-night discussion with a coach at this year’s Pennsylvania state scholastics about this very issue. This year’s tournament increased its trophy distribution by 20% over the 2011 edition - and the coach complained bitterly that there weren’t enough trophies. I’ve never actually seen Tom lose patience with someone - but he came close on that night. :slight_smile:

I do believe there’s a point where scholastic tournaments get oversaturated with awards. But I appear to be in the rather small minority - and most of us in the minority aren’t the paying customers.

I would rather have them playing chess for the “wrong reasons” than not playing at all. I also submit that whether one’s motivation is “right” or “wrong” is largely an individual question. As a kid, I liked winning trophies - be it at math, debate, chess, spelling, baseball or whatever. There’s nothing wrong with a child being motivated by shiny dust collectors, so long as they know they have to work pretty hard to get one, and so long as they know that the bigger the competition, the more difficult that will be.

“To put a child in a position to care about winning and not to prepare him is wrong.” - Ben Kingsley as Bruce Pandolfini in Searching For Bobby Fischer

Parents and coaches are responsible for knowing what they’re getting a kid into. As the saying went when I was a teenager, if you don’t know, you better ask somebody.

As a scholastic player, I actually agreed with this. I still agree with it now - personally, that is. However, as an organizer and director, I find that the customers want what they want, and one thing they really don’t want is to hear about devaluation. So, you give them what they want.

15

Depends why you are doing it yourself. If you are running scholastic tournaments for the sake of the income, the players and their parents are your customers, and if you want to maximize the revenue, it is best to give them what they want. That will maximize your revenue.

However, if you are doing it because you think that chess provides young people with valuable social, emotional, and intellectual lessons, and you only require enough revenue to be able to continue running the program, then there is no need to do things which undermine what you are trying to achieve, no matter how crowd-pleasing those things would be.

My view is that Sevan is right about trophies and that handing out trophies like candy for phony achievements is worse for young people than handing out candy like candy.

16

Cash prizes for kids has always seemed a bit weird to me. Can you think of any other type of kids’ competition in which the prizes are in cash? I actually think a trophy, medal, or ribbon is usually more meaningful to a kid, since it is clearly related to the event, whereas the cash given out in cash prizes looks just like any other cash in your wallet.

I’m also not convinced that cash prizes are important even for adults. I do competitive swimming as well as chess, and I’ve never seen a masters swim meet at which cash prizes were given. Yet the meets have entry fees, just like chess tournaments, and adults come.

Here are my feelings, speaking as a participant:

Participation awards are, in my opinion, about the most worthless thing around. They cost money, thereby raising the entry fee, but mean absolutely nothing because all participants get them.

At the same time, I tend to be turned off when no prizes of any kind are given (no cash, no trophies, no medals, no ribbons). The word that comes to mind is “cheap” (in the sense of value rather than price).

The type of prizes should, in my opinion, be related to the level of the competition. Ribbons may be adequate for a low-level competition. Medals are more appropriate when the level of competition is somewhat higher. And trophies are best suited to championship competitions.

Bob

17

Tournaments in general - and scholastic tournaments in particular - are not about the organizer(s). They are about the players. Without the players, there are no tournaments.

Maximizing revenue is not the only reason you would give them what they want. It’s not even the primary reason. Customer satisfaction is the primary goal of every organizer I know - whereas profit, on the other hand, is decidedly NOT. In fact, very few individuals run scholastic tournaments for personal profit. In the case of USCF, and some state affiliates, the scholastics they run have to be profitable, so the events are structured to achieve that. But if people didn’t find them enjoyable, and worth coming to year after year, then everyone loses, because the events wouldn’t exist.

Kids only get the larger life benefits from chess, and chess tournaments, if they actually play. So, it makes sense to do what it takes (within economic reason) to get them to play. I believe the player is better off playing than not playing, even if the motivation is not what I would personally prefer.

You deleted the part where I pointed out my personal agreement with this. I always preferred fewer trophies as a scholastic player. I wanted to stand out as an award winner. Most local scholastic events don’t have this problem, because income is quite limited. I actually thought the National High School gave out way too many trophies the one year I played in it.

As an organizer and director, though, I find that the very people I purport to serve in those roles want more awards. So, as long as the event’s budgetary goal (be it to not lose more than a certain amount, to break even, or to make a certain profit) is not threatened, the alleged harm from increasing the awards pales, IMHO, in comparison to the clear benefits of keeping existing players and attracting new players.

18

I’ve never given a cash prize in a scholastic tournament. I don’t think that’s appropriate.

Now, in open tournaments, I’ve handed kids prize checks, and they seem pretty happy with getting a real check in their name.

Personally, I think this has trickled down - and a lack of sponsorship for top players is really what has caused this trickle-down effect. The top players only come out when there’s money involved. They tend to attract players in a tier below them - who know they’re likely to lose, but hey, let us have a class or “under” prize that we can win. Their presence draws the next tier below them - who want the same consideration. And so on, and so forth. The only way to generate these prizes is through entry fees. So, you keep having to raise EFs to feed the beast.

If there were more sponsorship dollars, though, you could hold events with lower EFs and lower - or perhaps even no - prizes. And you’d still draw stronger players, who now wouldn’t have to worry as much about winning the event to pay their bills. Alternately, you could offer tournaments with very low EFs and no or token prizes. If you’re hoping to attract the 2200+ crowd, though, that probably won’t work. Doesn’t mean you can’t have a good tournament, though!

19

If this trickle down theory is right, and I think it might well be, how did the “trickle down” get started? Why don’t the top players play except for money? Don’t they find chess fun? I can see why someone would not want to be substantially stronger than everybody else in a tournament. That doesn’t sound like fun, at any level. Everybody at any level can be expected to seek out tournaments that will give them stimulating competition and pass on those that don’t. But why are the top players any different than everybody else – interested in good competition and a nice game of chess, rather than cash prizes.

20

First, this could (should?) be its own thread. I don’t want to hijack the original thread with this discussion. So, if the moderators were to split this off, that would be very reasonable, IMHO.

Now, what follows is pure - and incomplete - speculation. I wasn’t even alive during some of the period I’m about to discuss. I’ve been fortunate enough to have spent a lot of time talking with people who were, though, and I think I have my history right in what I’m about to put forward. As always, I welcome corrections and additions.

The short version: a lack of corporate dollars, combined with a steep increase in professional players, drove organizers toward the larger-prize structure for open tournaments.

It’s been said on these forums that, for top players, US chess tournaments in the '60s and '70s were much more about playing for (in lieu of a better phrase) the love of the game, rather than any lucre being offered. This time roughly coincided with the Fischer boom (which really picked up in 1972, and ran through the mid-'70s). During that time, there was much better sponsorship in the United States. You had strong international tournaments held in the US, the Church’s Chicken simultaneous tours were going around the country, and an explosion of young junior talent. So, it was much easier to get very good, good and rapidly improving players to play, even in small-bore local events.

When Fischer disappeared from the chess scene, there was a drop in enthusiasm from sponsors. So, some money disappeared from the scene. Around the same time, the weekend Swiss became more popular, but stronger players were attracted primarily by cash prize offerings. (A side issue: as a result of the Fischer boom, there were more US masters, some of whom were looking to play for a living.) Throw in the energy and economic crises of 1979-80, and that kind of coincided with the end of certain events like the Lone Pine tournament series.

Another “money” development occurred when the Berlin Wall fell. Around that time, a flood of strong USSR and Eastern Bloc GMs came westward. A fair number of them landed in the US, and these were people who were certainly reliant on the game to make a living. So, the idea of the chess tournament as an income generator for professionals was reinforced, even for smaller events. You wanted to draw these players - but they weren’t coming unless they stood to win something for their time.

So, between 1972 and, say, 1990, we went from having a fair number of corporate and private donors financing big events and paying players for their services, to scrambling for sponsors like Software Toolworks and Jose Cuchi. And once they left the scene, nothing really took their place.

As I have disclosed before, I do some directing for CCA events. CCA has been criticized here and elsewhere for changing the focus of American chess to money, rather than pure competition. I think those criticisms, in light of the above history, are misguided. CCA simply came up with the only way I can think of to make large, professional-caliber chess tournaments work without corporate sponsorship. It’s not perfect. But finding sponsors is hard. Keeping them is even harder. And without them, players have to pay their own freight.

(Side note: I wish the New York Open still existed. John Fedorowicz ran through a series of strong Russian GMs to win that event in '89, I believe. He became my favorite GM on the spot, and I always dreamed of playing that tournament. That was, I’m pretty sure, the most GM-laden open tournament regularly held in the US, ever. Alas, without a sponsor, it wasn’t possible to offer the same conditions, and eventually, the event died.)