Directors Experience Requirements / non-USCF tournaments

Running Chess Tournaments
21

I’ve changed my mind here and agree that the market doesn’t weed out any TDs whatsoever. The only time TDs get weeded is when the USCF suspends them or the TDs themselves burn out.

But still so what?

Most Scholastic tournaments that I have run have had more than 50 players. And for most part they have been harder than the twenty to thirty adult tournaments that I have run. You can’t just tell the kids anything. They then tell their coaches and then you would have to deal with them. Adult tournaments tend to be easier because the adults know the rules.

22

Any USCF member can become a club level TD by sending in the application form.

23

Speaking from the experience of scores of adult tournaments and hundreds of scholastic tournaments (and seconding Wayne Zimmerle’s comment):
The 150 rated players are MORE likely to question a ruling, and will often require you to get the rulebook to show them why you made the ruling. They are also more likely to appeal a chief TDs ruling even if they are completely incorrect in their appeal (explaining the ruling to the coach will generally resolve the issue).

Since you focused just on those cases where the TDs initial ruling was wrong, I don’t really know whether or not your statement is correct, as I can’t remember the last time I changed the initial ruling of a floor TD for a game with players rated that low (I may have done so, but I can’t remember any off hand).

As far as adult tournaments go, it is rare for the TDs I’ve worked with to make an incorrect ruling. Virtually all of the appeals I’ve heard from experts have been on unusual circumstances, and the initial ruling was correct anyway (part of the reason for that is that if the floor TDs in our area are uncertain about the ruling they generally just take a pass on making the ruling and instead defer it to a higher ranked TD).

24

First off I never had anyone make an appeal of any of my decisions, as I never had to deal with the rules of 21H and 21I. Would accept that master verses master would come down to an appeal with an appeals committee with rule 21I1. It would be strange to see two players that play under 500 would demand an appeal to the level of an appeals committee. As most times when I have a scholastic tournament, I am the only certified director. It would be very annoying if my decision was over turned in an appeal with players under 500 to say that stalemate is checkmate.

25

I think the types of rulings that low rated players might question are different than those that experts would question.

I’ve never had an expert ask me if a position was checkmate or not.

I’ve never had a player under 1000 ask me if a position involved a threefold repetition of moves or the 50 move rule.

And I’ve never had even one of my rulings appealed by the players.

I have had a coach question one of them, but the two players involved in that game thought the ruling was equitable and it was not appealed. Interestingly enough, that ruling (made at the National High School Championships in KC) led to a change in the USCF rules regarding draw offers and a forfeit on time.

26

Pretty common in Ohio scholastics for a scholastic player to claim threefold repetition or the 50 move rule. Fortunately for the director the players that do make the claim don’t have a complete scoresheet.

27

I usually cover that in my pre-tournament announcements by saying that if you do not have a reasonably complete scoresheet you CANNOT claim threefold repetition or the 50 move rule.

I have had a player rated around 800 make a valid claim of perpetual check, which he was able to demonstrate to my satisfaction even without a complete scoresheet. (That player is now rated higher than I am.)

28

One group of appeals regards “rules” that the player knows. I’ve had scholastic players start appealing my denial of the 15-move draw claim, the move-50 draw claim (since the game has reached move 50, it “must” be a draw), three-fold repetition when only one player was repeating his half of the position, etc. The players are generally SURE I’m wrong because they are quoting the rules that were given by their parent or coach (usually MISquoting because they didn’t quite understand the explanation).

Walking around with a copy of the rulebook is usually enough to forestall those appeals, but some players have even gone so far as to say I must have the wrong version of the rulebook because they know what the rule is. At one of the National Elementary tournaments the player with black arrived after the start of the round and before making his first move he wanted to replace white’s analog clock with his time-delay digital clock. He appealed from the floor director to the section chief, and then to the floor chief (a senior TD and two NTDs). He then wanted to get his coach to argue his case because we were “obviously” wrong to not let him change out the clock, but opted not to when told that this was not really an appealable decision and that his clock would continue to run while he tracked down his coach.

The second group of appeals are true appeals. So far, of the appeals that actually went to an appeals committee, the only appeals committee that overturned me ended up helping to inspire a rules change to avoid that type of situation in the future. The NTD floor chief made a ruling. As the ANTD overall chief I upheld the ruling. An appeals committee was formed that consisted of a senior TD, a local TD and a non-TD (or club TD) master. The senior TD voted to uphold the ruling, but was outvoted by the other two on the appeals committee. The idea of a local TD and a club TD being able to overturn a combined senior TD, ANTD and NTD helped spark a change to 21I1 that made a special referee preferable, especially when the appeals committee could not be made up of TDs of at least the level of the TD(s) whose ruling was being appealed. In this instance, the player the appeals committee ruled against ended up appealing to the USCF, which then made it to the rules committee.

There was also a touch move case with multiple ear-witnesses that none of the other floor TDs would touch. As floor chief (SrTD) I ruled that it was touch move (the ear-witness is to the defensive comment “it’s not touch-take” - the player couldn’t explain why he would say that if he hadn’t actually touched the other player’s piece). The chief TD (NTD) overruled me based on there being no actual eye-witness (the eventual claim made by the player to the NTD was that the comment really meant that since he didn’t actually touch the piece then he didn’t have to take it, but he couldn’t come up with that argument while I was asking him about the comment). The appeals committee restored my original ruling.

29

I think if you are wanting to encourage renewals of players rated under 400, you must give them something to play for. I have been offering trophies for ratings under 800, 600, 400 and (on occasion) under 200. The results have been good in terms of retention. It is no different than having U1200 prizes in an open tournament. The idea is reward acheivement, which may be just getting a draw! As long as the kids know how to play a game, my job as a TD is to give them a positive chess experience to keep them wanting to play. They will improve as long as they keep playing. Most parents whose kids drop chess tell me it is because their children are watching the same kids walk away with the prizes in an age-based structure and don’t feel they have a chance to win anything.

Take care
Hank Anzis

30

It sounds like the winners and the rest would all be better off, if the winners moved on to a higher level of chess where they could learn something. This should be encouraged strongly: they may be ready to become junior chessplayers competing outside the scholastic setting.

31
32

The parents of scholastic tournaments are of mixed feelings with scholastic tournaments. The only way I can make a judgment call if the scholastic tournaments could be rated or should not be rated is to understand the coaches. If the coaches are USCF members, there is not a problem to have the tournament USCF rated. If the coaches are not USCF members, than I really need to understand the coaches.

When talking to the coaches that do not understand:

  1. That stalemate is not checkmate, it is a draw.
  2. King verses king is not the only insufficient material to end the game as a draw.
  3. How to use a clock.
  4. How to use a scoresheet.
  5. Needing to understand ‘en passant’ is a legal move.

It is in the best interests of the scholastic players to have the tournament rated when the coaches fail to understand the basic questions?

When dealing with teaching at any level, have always made this my maxim: “You cannot teach someone beyond your own education.” If the coaches do not understand these questions, how are the majority of the players really going to play? If I have this scholastic tournament rated, all the experience I will ever get is crowd control.

33

Well everyone has to start somewhere. If for instance they don’t know the above I would imagine it won’t take long for them to learn it.

Unless of course some TD tells them they are wasting his and their time.

34

I agree totally with this statement. We are trying to do that the best we can. We do have a few “successes” and I would say that in our area, probably a 1/4 of players in our small adult tournaments (about 40 - 50 players) are usually kids rated 1000 - 1800.

I am still trying to figure out a little of what I seem to be reading. I don’t understand what is wrong with introducing as many kids as possible to chess as a game. Some will choose chess as something they can be good at and will become fairly strong players.

It is true that some times it seems the same kids win the trophies all the time. We do start teaching about the 4-5 grades (sometimes at 2-3 grade) that if you really want to improve you need to “play up” and play in adult tournaments. A lot of kids do.

A huge problem we do have, and it has been referenced on the thread, is that we don’t have enough really knowledgeable chess teachers and a lot of kids don’t really know how to play for their first couple of tournaments. A lot of time in our K-1 sections is spent explaining how to determine checkmate. A lot of stalemates happen. We teach a lot of kids the en passant rule. I guess we make the judgement that its better the kids have clubs in their schools and that they learn all the rules as soon as possible. If we turned away all the volunteers who don’t know how to play, a lot of kids wouldn’t be able to play. Sometimes you have to look at your K-1 section as a place where kids get a little better education than they get in their clubs.

Now, should these be rated games? I don’t know - I know I ran two beginners sections at our 2nd local tournament this year, one for K-1 players and one for 2-3 grade players who had never played in a tournament before. I took the time to explain some chess etiquette, I took some time to tell some coaches which kids need to learn to do checkmate. We played the games as G/20 so it did not affect “Official” regular ratings and so the kids could get in 3 rounds before noon. About 45 kids participated. (along with the 150 in regular sections)

We are trying to do the best we can to both produce good players and to introduce the game to as many kids as we can. I think both are good intentions. Mike Nolan has told me that we might be doing slightly better than average with about a 35% retention rate year to year.

Anyway, I sometimes just can’t figure out how being critical of people who are trying to do the best they can as volunteers does any good. Certainly it doesn’t help grow the game.

35

Everyone has to start some place; even I started with a non-rated scholastic tournament. The question becomes, if you know as a director the players are not ready to play over-the-board, why push them into a rated tournament?

Is it up to the director to teach the players the ‘basic’ rules before the start of the tournament? When was the last time you went to a tournament to have the director give the pre-announcement over en passant being a legal move?

36

Sometimes even if the coach is a rated player it doesn’t help.

At the 1978 National HS in Philadelphia I had a player come to me and tell me that his opponent moved a piece, took his hand off it, not punch the clock, and then take the move back, and make a different move with the same piece. I come to the board and asked the opponent if this is what he did. He said yes, and I explained that it wasn’t clock move, and once he took his hand off the piece the move was done. (Back then the rulebook language did not include determination of move.) No problem. The opponent made the original move, and I thought to myself I wish all disputes were so simple.

About an hour later I have enraged coach yelling at me that I made the wrong ruling on his player. I had made several rulings that round so I had no idea what he was talking about. Turns out he was the coach of the player who tried to play another move after taking his hand off. The coach was trying to tell me that since his kid had not punched his clock that his move wasn’t completed therefor he could make a different move. I explained the rule, and I think I had to get the rulebook out and show him the section about completed moves.

After he left I was thinking to myself that this guy must be some random teacher who’s the chess club advisor and knows a little something about chess, but not much about the rules. I was wrong. He had a rating of 1800 and was playing in the A section of the concurrent class tournament that we were running.

37

I have a book written by Horowitz in which he categorically states that a player cannot castle if his rook is under attack.

38

We can talk about horror stories with parents and coaches; it really does not prove anything. Even with USCF member coaches, I still like to talk to them before the tournament to get an understanding that they are and what are there goals. It is true I have never been a director with a state association or a national organization tournament. At that level, there is little or nothing I could perform to pre-screen the coaches or any director can do to perform pre-screening of the coaches at that level.

The more I post and read other postings from other posters. It looks like I have evolved to a different accepted standard that would not be a major change with the rules. The most critical errors that can happen with a scholastic tournament would be the tournaments when the tournament is just for the local scholastic players within the school itself.

Maybe the JTP tournaments need to be redefined as a different category with experience requirements for directors. It looks to be clear I never defined my displease in the idea that JTP tournaments could be the only types of tournaments someone could use for experience requirements to become a candidate of the next level of certification.

Do know there have been a few questionable results with any of the non-rated tournaments I have conducted over the years. In large part, with the fast pace of the rounds, it really has force myself to be at a static position. One time the round just started, the players were looking to find each other at the boards; one player came up to me, first thinking he was going to ask who was his opponent, in fact he was reporting his results. Since being the only certified director in the tournament, it did force me to stay more at a static position then dealing with floor duty. This leaves me with a problem of needing floor directors, the only answer was use the coaches as my tournament aids. This is a clear breach of protocol, it is acceptable in a non-rated tournament but not with a rated tournament.

There are a number of directors that understand some times you have to bend a little how formal or acceptable the scholastic tournaments have to be. In my area, there are not any certified directors in my area I can just make a local phone call to help me out with a scholastic tournament of forty-eight players. Have been working hard to get a pool of directors, only to become my best hope and my worst disappointment. Would have to say some tournaments should not be USCF rated period. In my view, JTP tournaments should be non-rated tournaments.

39

Let me try to answer from my own point of view, believing that I’m not entirely alone.

I don’t understand scholastic chess. I was never in it; it didn’t exist when I was a kid. I was drawn to chess because (and I have to say this to paint the picture) I was quickly very good at it. I think that is generally true of our good players, especially those who have become much better than I am.

I understand that in Europe there are some programs that take in large numbers of school kids, provide some training, select a relatively few promising ones, and produce far more grandmasters than would come with the sort of benign neglect from the educational system that I experienced. I hope that our scholastic chess teachers are up on such developments in the field and I assume that many of them are.

But it seems that we aren’t getting more promising junior players in the US than we ever did. If that’s true, then the scholastic chess system isn’t apparently proving useful for that purpose. Maybe there’s a broader educational purpose – a recent article in CL mentioned a dissertation that made that case.

There are offsetting costs to all this. Scholastic chess is a constituency with some different objectives than we’re used to. We have masses of kids with absurdly low ratings, yet we’re told often enough that they should play rated chess and want it. We have directors who direct an essentially different event but are certified in the same system. We have some vocal people who believe that everyone in the USCF leadership must be PG-13 because of the scholastic members. I can tell you that was never an issue with the junior players of old; actually we didn’t follow the adults in chess politics.

It seems that we have two organizations in one, and maybe it’s time to provide more specialized services to each side while keeping the door of tournament chess wide open to anyone who feels like showing up and registering for it.

40

Though this thread started regarding motivation behind running rated scholastic tournaments for filling directing certification requirements. There have been some interesting points brought up regarding the appropriateness of rated scholastic events, and how directors deal with the challenges of dealing with the parents, coaches and players.

I’ve directing scholastic tournaments for over 15 years. I do most of my scholastic directing for one particular organization. When we first started running tournaments we had 5 different sections, all which were rated including K-1. We stopped rating the K-1 section when we found we have a few kids with 1100 ratings based on just their 1-2 years worth of playing in K-1, and would get eaten alive in 2nd and 3rd grade. Then we went to this format:

K-1 (unrated)
Primary (rated no upper limit) K-3
Elementary (Rated, under 1000) K-6
Reserve (Rated, K-9)
Championship (Rated) K-12

There were flaws with this breakdown because kids would go from unrated play to rated play in 2nd grade whether they were good enough or not. We had a few 2nd graders with ratings of 30. (Pre 100 floors)

There were problems even as kids got older because a 4th grader with a 1000 rating would be forced into a section with junior high kids. Low rated high school kids ended out in the champuionship section with strong 9 year olds. High school kids don’t like when they get smashed by some little kid 1/2 their age and size.

A few years ago we added a 2-5 unrated section. This has worked out well as a transition for the newer players. Players with ratings under 300 are allowed to play in this section. Sometimes this one section will have as many players as the other 5 sections combined. We do move people into rated sections after a couple of times of scoring 3-1 or better. But if they end out with a sub 300 rating they can return to the unrated section.

We also changed the grade and rating breakdowns in the rated sections to resolve some of the age and ability issues.

K/1 unrated
2-5 unrated
Primary K-3 no upper limit
Elementary K-6 no upper limit
Reserve k-12 under 1100
Championship K-12 1100+

Most of the 1100+ rated players in the lower grades will opt to move up to Championship section for the experience, but some who aren’t comfortable playing older kids may choose to play with their age peers.

Having that 2-5 unrated section has been a good stepping stone from K-1 to rated play. I can’t say our retention record is better then anyone elses, but some of our tournament alumni have done pretty well for themselves. Perhaps you might recognize a name in this particular Primary section. Scroll past the Top 10. Little did the number 2 and 6 place finishers realize they beat a future US Champion.

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