I’ll go further and say that the USCF should REQUIRE on-line TLAs for all tournaments that are to be rated.
The only exceptions should be:
Certain closed championships and invitation-only events.
Tournaments only open to students at a specific school, members of a certain club, etc.
Matches (I’m not sure we should rate these for levels below master - but that’s a different discussion)
Even the invitation-only events could be listed for information. Why not? After all, the info will be on-line eventually in the MSA area (after it’s rated). The benefits of having all of this information available probably more than justifies the small effort that would be required.
You are making the unwarranted assumption that everyone has access to, and the capacity to use, the Internet. This is manifestly untrue. I don’t think that reducing the pool of potential organizers is a good idea.
Somehow this seems familiar. I think there was a call many years ago to only rate events which had a TLA in Chess Life.
That was a bad idea then, this is a bad idea now.
Let’s ENCOURAGE organizers to enter their online TLAs for free, let’s not REQUIRE it.
Right now we run TLAs for about 25% of the events that we rate. My prediction is that with free online TLAs by next fall we will see TLAs entered for about 75% of the events we rate.
Some have suggested that free online TLAs will decrease the number of TLAs printed in Chess Life. Even though I don’t think that would be a problem, I’m not so sure that will be the result. I think that since the organizer will have already typed in all the information needed to prepare the TLA for Chess Life, some may go ahead and pay for an insertion in the magazine.
Here’s an example of why this is a bad idea:
I once got snowed in at a tournament at Wayne State College in Wayne Nebraska. The college found us rooms in the dorm, we held an impromptu tournament at 2AM.
Under your proposal that tournament would not have been USCF ratable.
In itself, this should not be a factor in the USCF’s decision-making. TLAs are not supposed to be money-makers for USCF; the fees are simply supposed to cover the costs. (This is not my opinion, it is a policy repeatedly stated over the years.) Now, if the absence of print TLAs (whether or not matched by an increase of on-line TLAs) were followed by a decline in tournament play, that would be another matter. I don’t know that this will take be the case, but it is certainly possible.
The USCF spends about $700,000 on printing and mailing of the magazine. There are about 900 pages/year in the magazine. That means that each page costs around $777 to print and mail. That doesn’t include personnel or overhead costs.
At $2 to $4 per line (depending on the length of the TLA) and about 250-300 lines of TLAs per page, I think the USCF is about breaking even on TLAs.
However, if the number of pages of printed TLAs does go down, then that means a loss of revenue with (probably) little or no corresponding decrease in expenses.
I don’t think it is likely that online TLAs will lead to a decrease in the number of rated games, I think it is more likely they will lead to an increase.
I’m not sure it’s that great an idea to rate impromptu events held at 2AM. If you want to have one, though, I guess you should be able to.
I won’t claim this was a well thought-out idea. I’m sure it needs some work and I wouldn’t suggest implementing it until we’ve had some experience with the new on-line TLAs and see how things go.
If your 2AM tourney happened today, you’d probably be able to connect to the internet and create a TLA right before the tourney through a campus LAN (once your on-line TLA system is up). The last few tournaments I’ve been to, I’ve had wireless connectivity almost the whole time. Listing it on the TLA system at the last minute would be enough – if the effort had to be made anyway then most would list the tournaments well in advance.
I do keep forgetting that not everyone is as crazy about computers and the internet as I am. Chess players being a reactionary bunch, there might be several that would be excluded – so that’s enough to make it a bad idea. It won’t be long, though, before nearly everyone can be on-line whenever they want, and computers have become a nearly indispensable tool for TDs (and chess players in general). As a matter of fact, I would bet that if you took a poll at most tournaments you’d find that several players have gotten on the internet while at the tournament.
For those rare areas where you can’t connect, and your cell phone won’t connect to the internet, and you can’t call a friend that could make a quick entry for you (because its 2AM!), and there aren’t any other ways make the TLA – how necessary is it that the event be rated? Maybe one tournament in a thousand might not be rated for this REASON (might be more that would use this as an excuse). Is this a significant enough percentage for policy decisions? Couldn’t such events be handled as exceptions and rated anyway?
Why defeat the purpose of the online TLAs by making them Mandatory?
If you are going online to look up tournaments in California or whereever why do you want to have to search through all the Peoria, Illinois rated Monday night events. The Organizers and TDs would be the best positioned to know if a TLA would be a benefit to their event. I would put in our Saturday events. We already do two magazine issues for each weekend tournament we do. TLAs on line Great idea. Mandatory not.
Why should having a bunch of events listed make them hard to search? They’re on a COMPUTER. If you want to know find a tournament that’s to be held on Monday nights in Peoria or Saturday mornings in LA, it should be an easy search! I’ve seen a few weeknight club events in the TLAs – they’ve never gotten in my way even when I was using the magzine adds rather than an on-line system.
Benefits:
Having the information always in the same place would be great even for club tournaments. How many times have members said, “I really wanted to play in that, but forgot when it started”? Or “Sorry to call so late, but is next monday supposed to be 15 minute games or 5 minute?, I’m not going to bother going for the …”. If all of the tournament info was ALWAYS in the same place it’d be a lot easier to keep track of, even for events of purely local interest.
You might also be surprised how much non-local interest you get in such events. If the information was readily available, you might have a lot of people on business trips that stop by when they haven’t got anything else to do. Or a nearby city might get in touch and say “I see you have 15 minute tournaments the same time we do, maybe we could have a club vs. club match sometime”.
In the future there will be room for even further improvements. Search by drive time from your own house, for example. You could take the service a step further by letting members create their own customized lists of upcoming tournaments with links to the tournament announcements and warnings if a TLA changed after the member had added it to “his” list of future events. Members could e-mail each other their lists (be a great way to arrange getting together with an old friend from the university chess club, for example).
Unless somebody wants a “secret” chess tournament, I can’t think of how an on-line TLA would hurt. If you do want some tournaments to be unlisted, why shouldn’t you simply create exceptions to the general policy?
Two genuine problems I see:
There may be a substantial number of TDs or organizers without computers or internet access. I was really surprised when I saw how many ratings reports were still being done on paper.
It would be extra mandatory work for organizers. A really minor amount of work compared to filing a rating report, though.
Maybe we’re not quite ready for mandatory on-line TLAs yet, but I think the time won’t be that far off.
They wouldn’t be hard to search( if you knew what you were looking for) they would be harder to browse. I’m all for the online TLA concept. I just don’t believe making it mandatory is the way to go.
I direct for a number of scholastic affiliate organizers that are not set up to take on-line submission. I’ve pushed for it and I’ve emphasized the 10% savings, but saving $18 on the rating fee for a 400-player, 900-game annual tournament is not enough of an incentive to get the affiliate officers to set things up (many scholastic affiliate officers are NOT members of the USCF - I can’t remember whether or not you need to be a member to update the affiliate information).
As a result, I submit my club’s tournaments on-line and the scholastic tournaments are generally submitted on paper/disk. I’m sure there are other directors doing tournaments for multiple affiliates and sending some results in on-line and some via the mail. The ones via the mail are often sent in along with dozens new memberships.
An organizer running multiple tournaments in a year may feel comfortable doing the on-line TLA, but some of the organizers that only do annual events (multi-hundred players, but only annual) would be upset at making an on-line TLA a requirement to hold the event. By the way, the rating report is done by the TD rather than the organizer, and the two positions are generally not held by the same person in this area’s scholastic tournaments.
Just putting out flyers at the local events can result in the maximum allowable number of players being reached. Before doing scholastics I never realized that organizers would sometimes find it necessary to reject advance entries after the first 200 or 300 players were registered. Twenty years ago there was an organizer who would even call coaches and ask if they could reduce their number of players so that there would be space for more teams.
I don’t really see that big a problem with those that still report results on paper or with those that are resistant to going on-line. It’s a problem that will take care of itself over time. People will demand “instant” tournament & ratings results, people will be more comfortable with computers and the on-line tools, etc. I don’t think it’ll take very long.
The fact that some scholastic tournaments already get as many or more entries as they can handle is not a good reason to omit a TLA. On the contrary, only if all the information about all the events is widely available can you be fair about who is excluded and who is allowed to participate. In some cities, for example, it would be very easy to practice discrimination in your chess tournaments by just notifying certain schools later than others. (I’m NOT accusing anyone of this) Letting everyone know about the events is the best policy. If that’s the policy, then why not take advantage of a free (to the organizer) medium that is widely accessed by target participants?
Just speaking for myself: If I didn’t happen to have a friend that has kids involved in chess, then I’d have never known about 90% of the surrounding scholastic chess tournaments. I wouldn’t have known where to look or even that I SHOULD look outside of Chess Life. The result of not having TLAs is to keep my daughter and others like her out of organized chess. This wouldn’t be a good result, right?
Basically, I’m concerned that inertia will keep many tournaments from ever being listed in TLAs. Especially scholastic events and other events where there is a perception that enough people will already know about them.
Why should they be mandatory? Because there would be a benefit to the chess community as a whole, with little costs (a couple minutes effort on-line for each organizer).
I’d be open to other suggestions on encouraging the use of TLAs other than “THOU SHALT CREATE TLAs” comming down from above. Maybe charge a small surcharge for Rating events that hadn’t been listed? (Increase rating fees across the board and have a discount for creating a TLA if you want to be more popular). I truly think that there is some justification for this. This small surcharge (or discount for listing) could be gradually increased as people get more used to using the system.
I’m not worried about inertia, my predictions about the extent to which TDs would turn to online submission of memberships and rating reports were spot on, I think you’ll see 75% of the events we rate have online TLAs within a year of when the system goes live.
Of the 25% that aren’t advertised online, most will be for events (such as in-school scholastic competitions, invitational events and matches) that aren’t open to outside entries anyway.
I’ve been thinking that we need to review rating report fees some time later this year, a little incentive for events with online TLAs might go a long way.
Google is not a good model for a search engine unless you’re interested in lots of hits, it encourages information overload…
Here’s what I currently have in mind for one of the modes for the search engine for online TLAs:
Enter your zip code and the radius you’re willing to travel to. Select if you want Grand Prix, money, trophy or scholastic events. Based on that, I’ll give you a list of events in the next X weeks, or possibly do it in calendar format.
Click on the events you’re interested in to get an online TLA that looks like a flyer.
nolan’s definately got the right idea here. Sounds great!
Google isn’t at all like what we’re talking about here. The USCF (nolan) has complete control of the format of the data we keep. He can provide a dedicated search engine that is specifically for looking for the chess tournaments you’re interested in. This gives nolan a lot of advantages over a general-purpose search engine. Kind of like having mapquest to find a hotel (with the hotels appearing on a map that you can center on the location you’re visiting) instead of using a text search on the street name (which could give you matches at the far end of the street and ignore the hotels one block over).
If he has time to really work on this, a few clicks of a mouse and you can get as specific as you want. Probably in a lot less time than browsing through the magazine, even if there are 4x as many ads.
Even browsing should go a lot faster, since the information doesn’t have to be scanned in the same way. Most of the tournament details could be accessed through a link rather than forced to be in-line with the tournament date and location (the first two things I “filter” by when scanning through the Magazine).
It looks like I definately picked some bad examples at the start of this thread, since there are now TLAs for two of the tournaments I mentioned. Since the web pages for the two states weren’t updated until February 6th (with a whole batch of other updates), I’m guessing that the TLAs were sent in several weeks ago and the problem was getting the web pages updated.
I knew the lead times for Chess Life TLAs meant they would have had to be submitted long ago to make the Feb Chess Life. I assumed (bad idea) that since they weren’t showing up on-line that they hadn’t been submitted. (I saw some pages being updated, so I thought there just weren’t any new TLAs for the other states).
So actually we’ve had two problems – a lot of tournaments not being advertised, and the tournament ads not showing up when received. Fortunately, letting organizers create their own on-line TLAs will help with BOTH problems.
Waiting until the magazine is in the mail to update the TLA pages is probably not the best way to handle TLAs from the member’s perspective, but that may have more to do with the workload in the publications department and something chess players should be familiar with–time pressure.
That’s why taking the publications department out of the loop as much as possible is a good thing.
I have no problem with online TLAs being available for events 6 or more months in advance if that’s what organizers choose to do.