There used to be one, but it seems to have been replaced by the search page. This works, but it’s a little tedious.
If you are close to the state border … the organizer should be willing to place the information in the five state area like you have. There are tournaments that happen in Toledo Ohio, have been to the site a number of times. The organizer does published a Ohio tournament within the Michigan Chess Association web-site.
Not everyone can or knows a place were they can get a copy of ‘Chess Life’ at a book store. Have found the Illinois web site as one of the best organized. Chess for the first time chessplayers … in theory … local not national. In theory … first time adults in a tournament … will or are willing to play only in local tournaments.
For someone that did grow up in a very rural … with old family names going back over 150 years … tournaments were far and long distance. Have always found it strange … a small number of USCF members that see each other week after week at the same rural chess club. What do they want … tournaments … why not have a small event with a number of friends?
What they do … get into a car pool and go to a long distance to play stranges that are the same or close to the same skill level as their friends in the car pool. Is it not strange, you can have three friends that play at the same class as yourself. Then you drive to a tournament just to play other players at the same class as your friends and yourself.
Never understood why chessplayers that have friends … are so happy to drive hours to a tournament just to play some strangers that plays just as strong as your friends. The point, you do not need to have 50 or 150 players … just to get in rated games on the weekend.
When I moved to Grand Rapids … a city of 220,000 people with the citys around the area … we are talking close to half a million people within 40 miles from the center of Grand Rapids. There was zero active directors in the area … zero active USCF chess affiliate. One of the major cities in the state of Michigan was a dead zone.
You need an active director in the souther part of your state … what most people have called down in Egypt in your part of the state. If you want to play rated tournament chess … become a director … get a USCF affiliate … run some small local tournaments. Find a bunch of your friends … get with each other at each others house … than play chess.
How can I make it more clear … if you like to drink coffee … and you like to drink coffee with other people around … open up a coffee house. For you and me … change coffee for chess … in time you will have so much chess you do not know what to do with so many people.
Glad your thinking of being a director …
Does anyone else head hurt after reading that?
Why would a group of friends drive together to play strangers? Because its fun to play other people. You are not going to get better playing the same 5 guys over and over again. Variety is the Spice of Chess (life). I am blessed to be able to play in one of 3 tournaments every week with more on the way. However, every now and then, I’ll drive a hour or two to play some OTHER people so It doesn’t get stale.
There is nothing wrong to drive hours to play other people. The question is for the small communities without active tournaments in the area. You are in a large state … with a number of people. If you feel your friends are day old bread … have you thought about retirement from the chess table?
We were talking abour rural areas … myself do not find southern Illinois as very rual. If you want to deal with very rural areas … go out west. As myself a class C player, in the state of Nebraska there are only 167 players over the rating of 1000. There are only 43 members … within a class C rating. Yeppers … in time only having to face 43 people in my rating class would become stale. Now I know why Mike Nolan does not play chess in his home state.
Now I’m thinking of title players … it must be very stale for them also … fly from one country to the next just to play someone in their rating. Starting to feel sorry for Veselin Topalov … only a few FIDE 2800 plus chessplayers in the world. Starting to think he must look up at the night sky, looking for an alian spaceship to come down to play a game of chess.
If you have found your chess friends as stale … have you thought about retirement?
The last few posts to this topic have been deleted because they were both off-topic and inappropriate for this forum.
Further abuses of this forum will result in sanctions.
Mike Nolan, Forum Moderator
I just created a unifed list at gpcf.net/links/statelinks.htm
I’ve just submitted two TLA’s online. It was my first time trying it. I hope I did everything right. It says “Pending approval” but it’s Friday night so I guess I’ll find out if I did everything right on Monday.
Will it tell me how, when, and where to send the money for the Chess Life TLAs? One of them is for a tournament just six weeks away, the guy who usually sends the TLAs in had to go to the hospital and I only just found out that he wasn’t able to send it in. I guess it’s too late for the next issue, but the one that comes out in February…?
On a slightly unrelated note, I consider myself “computer semiliterate” but I figured out how to submit rating reports through the computer, and it works great. And it saves the club some money too. (The club almost went broke twice last year!) Thanks to everyone who worked on that.
There is one good point about a TLA event, you have a shot to play someone you always wanted to be paired up with. There are players that will never go to any small event … it has to be a hotel … spending three nights … spending around $300 - $1,000 just for one event. Just to have a chance to win a prize under $200. This is worse odds than people that spend money on lottery tickets … but we love them. Sure you can be out a lot of money … just think … you had the luck or bad luck not to play who you always wanted to be paired with.
When to have a TLA … if you are not looking to get over 50 players … if you have a small tournament and close to the state border … than a TLA would be fine.
Please note, the online TLA area in the TD/Affiliate Support Area is still in development, it does not currently have a way to get a TLA to the Chess Life folks. I expect that to change fairly soon.
OK, I sent copies of the TLAs via email to USCF as well for CL.
Nolan,
Clarification question: You mentioned the online TLA process that is in development. Right now, the online lists in the Tournament section off of the main page are entered by USCF employees, and I can’t do it myself, right? (Virginia hasn’t been updated since December 18th, and I have a TLA for the Feb and March issue of Chess Life in. I expected to see it online by now. Was I supposed to do it myself?)
Rob
The current TLA listings are supposed to be updated by the office each month to match what’s in the magazine, I can ask Joan if there have been problems with that.
Indiana’s as well…
Not since Dec 18th
These are the downsides of a TLA for a smaller tournament. (say less than 30 people)
- You have to have all of your details together early, while on a website you can post the details with only a few weeks to go.
- You have to send in a check to pay for the TLA. It’s a hassle.
- Something could be wrong or your event could be cancelled but you won’t be able to correct it in time for people only getting news about your tournament via magazine.
- You have to ususally have get at least 3 extra people to show up who wouldn’t have shown up if you didn’t have a TLA to break even on the TLA. You rarely get the 3 extra people in my experience.
Free online TLA’s will be very helpful for a small state like mine.
It looks like the February State TLAs will arrive in Chess Life in the mail before they appear on-line. At first it just seemed like an archaic office policy to not publish TLAs on-line at the same time they’re ready to go to the printer (about a month before they arrive in the mail). Now it appears to be a staffing problem too (missing or not doing their job).
Simply posting the TLAs at the time they go to the printers would be a big improvement over past USCF office practice and gain most of the timing benefit that the instant TLAs will achieve (and maybe taking some of the pressure off that project). Enabling more players to get tournaments on their schedule earlier, and thereby more participation, should help the USCF with a few more memberships too.
Sure hope the new USCF Internet Director can better help Nolan make the website more useful for members, both current and prospective…
Mike Swatek
The person who has been posting the TLA files for the last couple of years has been having net connectivity problems from her home in Maine. (BTW, according to Joan, the TLAs from the January issue WERE posted.)
Last week we started training someone in the Tennessee office to take over that function. However, he was out sick on Friday, and I’m not sure if he’s gotten all the tools to convert the Chess Life files to the website format yet.
We also have started training someone in TN to handle the approvals for online TLAs. There are some web ormatting issues being worked on, once they’re completed I have the go-ahead from Bill Hall to roll this feature out.
Mike,
It’s good to hear the instant TLAs will be rolling out soon.
The January TLAs are a good example of the delay problem. The 18 Dec posting on-line of State TLAs was almost a full month after the January TLA editing deadline and presumably being sent to the magazine publisher soon after. This timing has been fairly consistent month-to-month. It could probably have been improved considerably with a policy change. However, the long awaited instant TLAs are going to be the best possible improvement.
Many thanks to you and Joan for all your efforts to bring the USCF toward the modern age of communications. Chess Life, lots of interactive games and interactive instructional articles on-line are way up there on my wish list for the USCF website offerings to provide more value for members only.
Keep up the good work,
Mike Swatek
The USCF’s web consultant, Paul Hoffman, wll be making a presentation to the Executive Board duing the Board’s meeting at the Amateur Team East, probably on Friday morning, February 17th…
I think the initial presentation will be open to the public and will cover a number of issues, such as major revisions to both Chess Life and the USCF website.
I’m just hoping to see my TLA pop up soon. I’ve been telling people that it will be online, (and purchased Feb and Mar TLA’s to get the information out earlier) and have been trying to compromise between patiently waiting and politely sending messages to the TLA dept asking when the TLA will appear on line.
I’m glad to hear that progress is being made on improving the process. I did get the feeling from my emails with the USCF staff that they didn’t see any ‘sense of urgency’ in getting the Feb TLA’s up on the website. It doesn’t line up with the “activity = membership” type thinking that we are supposed to be having.
Rob
I’m really looking forward to the free on-line TLAs. I hope everyone uses them – I see no downside at all.
It’s funny that in this one area the internet seems to have made it MORE difficult for me to get info about some medium sized tournaments. Instead of all the decent tournaments appearing in a TLA, I have to search several different web sites to find them. (I guess, to be honest, that for all I know there were a lot of bigger tournaments that I never heard of … But virtually everyone I knew advertised their tourneys in TLAs.)