I started a new chess club about 10 months ago in an area where no chess club has existed for quite awhile.
I was pleasantly surprised at the turnout over the time the club has existed. We have had about 25 people come at one time or another.
There are no membership dues as we really have no expenses.
The club is basically broken into 3 category of players. The top category is the USCF rated player of about 1500 and higher. The second is a group of people where some are USCF rated at 1200 or lower and the rest have never got a real rating but are stronger than the total beginner. Then there is the lowest category where these people are novices.
I want to get more people participating in chess and feel it is a good time to start something new. I feel that to expect people to show up every week is a bit much. I believe if we can get 1 - 2 times a month participation, that would be good.
I came up with an idea for a “Chess Series” (we can name it anything we want) with some of the following characteristics:
Each participant will pay a $10 entry fee. We will also collect some business donations. I estimate we can have about $300 for a total prize fund to be split into the 3 categories I mentioned above.
Over the school year, we will have series events, on club nights, where the participants can compete and accumulate their results for the series. I figure we can have 12 events over the school year.
At the end of the year prizes will be awarded accordingly.
What I need help with is the actual details of this series:
a. I could start a rating system using SwissSys where all the novices start at a rating of 1000, the intermediates at 1500 and the Open participants start at 2000. The problem I see with this is that I can’t limit the people to only compete with others in their group. This rating system may very well not allow for an accurate measurement of performance for this series competition.
b. I also have considered a point system on the results of the tournament. A person would receive so many points for placing first in his category, so many for second, etc. This would also allow us to use a set amount of tournament results for the competition. For instance, we could have 12 scheduled tournaments and use the person’s best 10 results in the scoring.
c. What do you people think would work best? I am certainly open to suggestions in this.
Rather than the standard ladder you could have a ladder that is based both on games within a group and games against other group players. You could do swisses, quads, and octogons. Multiple or single games per night/meeting can also be done depending on the time controls used. Maybe different points depending on play in a swiss versus quads or octogons, assuming that the swisses are where the cross group games occur. Quads can of course be run with 3-6 players [4 being ideal], but may have the odd rating [player strength] difference to deal with if 1 player is significantly weaker or stronger than the rest of the Quad. Octogons are good for 5-8 players and with use of cross round pairings can run OK even with an odd number of players. Again there may be the problem of weaker versus stronger players in the Octogon, but you are less likely for it to be just 1 player different from the others. Also, as a reward after a period of time [6-9 months maybe] you can have the top player in a lower group move up into the next higher group to play.
Obviously there are kinks to be worked out in the above suggested system, but it is an idea.
Our club has an event we call Olympic Quads every month or two. We want the players to meet a variety of opponents so we have a very strong player, a strong player, an average player and a poorer player in each of the first set of Quads. The next set of Quads has the winners in the top quad, the second place players in the second quads and so on. Each player gets 6 games often vs. 6 different players. We play G/10 and start at 7:15 and are usually done before 10:00. If we have 10 players we play a Quad and 3 rounds of a Hex. It is well received and a lot of fun. Sometimes we have it rated; one of our strongest players has never played in a slow time control event.
This might be appropriate for your club since you have several categories of players like we do.
We used to hold unrated ‘grab bag theme’ tournaments at the Lincoln Chess Club, for each game the players would pull a slip of paper with the first several moves of some opening variation.
The guy who ran them was notorious for loading the event with openings that most of us had little experience with. That’s what got me interested in playing the Falkbeer Counter Gambit.
Years ago the club was known for its ‘double alternating non-consultative speed chess’ events, in which teams of 2 took turns making the moves for each side but weren’t allowed to talk to their partners or otherwise indicate what moves to make. (If you get a highly positional and a strong tactical player on a team, it can get very amusing watching them try to find a common ground.)
40 years ago, when Bill Smythe was running the Northwestern Chess Club, he held occasional Kriegspiel tournaments.
Handicap speed tournaments are also fun. The lower rated player gets time odds, starting at 5 minutes per player and subtracting 1 minute from the higher rated player (adding it to the lower rated player) for each 100 points of ratings difference. We used to limit this at 1 minute, these days with delay clocks the higher rated player, if 500 or more points above his opponent, could get 0 minutes plus 3 or 5 seconds per move delay.
Those weren’t tournaments, those were just individual games I was refereeing, while others in the room were just playing skittles games. It just seemed like a tournament because the alternating announcements like “white has moved”, “black has moved”, “white captures at d5”, “check on the rank”, etc, could be heard by everyone in the room.
