What are you planning for National Chess Day?

Running Chess Tournaments
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The Route 20 Chess Club in Freeport, Ill., is holding an all-day community event featuring an open tournament, a speed chess tournament and exhibition, free chess lessons for beginners, and a screening of Searching for Bobby Fischer. We’re following it up two weeks later, on Saturday, Oct. 23, with our second rated beginners’ open and open Swiss tournament at Highland Community College in Freeport. After examining our local logistics and concluding that it was impossible to hold an unrated community tournament and a rated tournament on the same day (which is why we missed the Chess Life editorial deadline – we were still trying to figure out what to do), we decided to use the former to generate excitement for the latter.

The community celebration, cosponsored by the Freeport Public Library, Freeport Golden K and City Coffee Co., will be held at the library. All activities will be free and open to the general public. The tournament will be a 4/SS, G/30, divided into three youth-only sections (grades K–3, 4–8 and 9–12) and one open section. The K–3 section will be rated using JTP memberships to keep it free (h/t to Rob Jones for this suggestion, which we successfully test-drove in June). Winners will receive trophies and free entry to the RBO on Oct. 23. Beginners’ lessons will be held in two 2-hour sessions, and the movie will start at 3 PM, right after the tournament concludes. The celebration will then move to City Coffee Co. for a 6/SS, G/5, spectator-friendly blitz tournament. The first-place winner will receive a $20 prize; runners-up will receive coupons for coffee drinks.

Meanwhile, the library has ordered in a bunch of new chess books (which, thanks to the PrairieCat network, will be available for interlibrary borrowing all over northern Illinois) and will create special endcap displays featuring them. We’ll also have a small merchandise table, thanks to a $300 donation from Golden K to allow us to acquire inventory (half of our proceeds will be returned to that group), and face painting. :smiley:

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Our club, in Monroeville, Pa. is planning on running a tournament with both rated and unrated sections. We will give out a number of door prizes along with our normal prizes, Borders Gift Cards. We are likely to make some autumn oriented advertising. The TD might be asked to dress in a special way for the event. We haven’t worked out all of the details yet. Later in the month will will have something with a Halloween theme. In November we run a match between the Pilgrims (kids) and the Turkeys (adults) - the turkeys have to play without a piece or two, a “wing” or a “leg” to even up the games. I found a talking turkey hat in the local K-Mart. Might get it to make everyone laugh.
For all tournaments we advertise through e-mail and flyers that are posted at other events. So far we have done no USCF TLA’s. We put our events on a local clearinghouse website as we only expect local players or some of our 70+ club members to participate. We are also on a Yahoo groups site. Perhaps we will get some of our tech savvy kids to use twitter or Facebook for promotion.

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From the write-up in the CLO article, it looks like you had a very successful day. Congratulations!

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We enjoyed ourselves thoroughly.