I’m calculating prizes for a tournament and would appreciate confirmation if I’m looking at this right.
I have an unrated player in one section who is out of the money for a place prize, but would be tied for a class prize if he is eligible. We advertised that unrated players could only win a maximum certain amount in any section except Open, but said nothing about class prizes vs. place prizes.
The way I read the rule book, an unrated player shouldn’t be eligible for a class prize, but it doesn’t seem absolute. If he is eligible, he’s under our announced limit, so that’s not a problem.
As a side note, he did not have an unofficial rating from prior events. His rating after this event places him above the rating cutoff for the section he entered, let alone the class prize… I don’t think that answers the question, but it would seem to support my view that he shouldn’t be eligible for the class prize.
If you didn’t announce an Unrated class prize (or sometimes “Class E / Unrated” prize), then he’s technically outa luck.
Then again, if your event made money and the amount doesn’t overshadow anyone winning legit class prizes, it could be a good judgement call to hand his entry fee back as encouragement/promotion.
It may depend on EXACTLY how you worded the TLA, but if none of the class prizes mention unrated and there were no provisions given for setting a rating for unrated players for section/prize purposes, then unrated players are not eligible for any of the class prizes.
You were absolutely correct not to allow this player to win a class prize. Unrated players are eligible only for place prizes (and unrated prizes, if any).
The fact that this player’s post-event rating turned out higher than the eligibility cut-off for any prize he would have “won” is proof positive of the soundness of the above rule. Effectively you would be allowing an A player to win a B prize (or something similar).
[soapbox]
Some unthinking organizers routinely lump unrated prizes with the lower class prizes. This is an abomination. The hyphenated phrase “D-E-unrated” appears so often in TLAs that it might as well be in the dictionary, like “jack-o-lantern”. Such a prize will almost always go to an unrated rather than to a D-E.
An organizer who insists on lumping unrated prizes with class prizes should at least lump them with the higher classes, such as Expert.
Explaining to an unrated player why he is not eligible for a class or “under” prize can sometimes be difficult. Players sometimes think that “unrated” means “a rating of zero” instead of “does not have a rating.” I’ve tried offering an explanation such as “under 1500” means “has a rating and that rating is less than 1500,” but sometimes the confusion remains.
Which actually is something else I’ve wondered about… if you don’t want provisionally rated players to be eligible for certain prizes (class or upset prizes for example), what’s the most efficient and practical way to identify and remember who those people are when it comes time to compute prizes?
When you get or update ratings from the USCF supplement (in WinTD at least), there’s no indication. In a large tournament, I’d hate to have to look them all up on line, or to have to remember to check a special list at prize time.
The rating supplement (or at least the “golden database”) actually has two one-character fields (one for regular rating, one for quick) that tells whether a player is unrated, provisionally rated, or has an established rating. (The field names are R_PLR_TYP and Q_PLR_TYP, and the possible values are “U”, “P”, and “E”.) In SwissSys, you can go into “database setup” from the “database” menu and use one of the fields in the registration dialog for that information. I don’t know how to do this in WinTD; in general, I haven’t figured out how to configure the database setup in WinTD.