After reading the first page of the thread…and reading the Tournament Announcement…that’s what stood out to me. It’s the fringes (USCF Masters with no FIDE) that are hit hard.
Mr. Koganov’s feedback is gold to an organizer. A motivated potential customer on the fringes…a NM without a published FIDE rating. Sounds like a good group to invite into the B section…either late (we’re still months away) or for 2014.
From an organizer view, I think the overall structure is awesome. Kudos to Mike for putting together such an ambitious tournament. Motivated / cash-strapped players will find the individual sponsorship. Poker has a long tradition of staking…it’s worth looking into. Plenty of risk to go around.
In the interest of being constructive and positive here are my suggestions for 2014 edition.
In the Section A.
Remove over the top $600.00 - $800.00 entries fees, they are unheard of and create negative publicity.
Leave GM (both US and foreign) entry free.
Create Universal entry fee for everybody else, $350.00 or less, but provide discounts to titled players (IMs, FMs, WGMs) which you need for the norms. You can be creative about this discounts; obviously some obsolete titles like FCM should not get any discount.
Provide a path to players you do not want to have in Section A to play in Section B (see below).
In Section B.
Increase the rating cut to USCF U2300, or whatever you think makes sense.
Set entry fees to $199.00, but give modest discounts to seniors and talented juniors or kids.
Make prizes reasonable, but not high, so you do not loose your A-section players.
Some things nice to have:
Currently, tournament runs Tuesday - Sunday, that means that there is a possibility to have some side events the weekend preceeding Tuesday.
Consider having all or some of the following:
Two-days FIDE rated game 30 rapid as a warm up, prizes proportional to entries.
1-day blitz, prizes proportional to entries.
1-day 4-rounds G30 scholastic event.
1-day social event : GM simul, GM lectures etc.
MOST IMPORTANTLY : MAKE EVERY PLAYER WELCOME AT YOUR TOURNAMENT!
There are around 1000 USCF members who are masters and were active in the past 13+ months.
Of these, around 100 do not yet have a FIDE rating. 88 of those have a current rating under 2300, so someone designing an event for the future (trying to guess what FIDE will be requiring for FIDE rated or FIDE norm-eligible events, among other things) could think about having a B section that was open to non masters plus masters under 2300 USCF rating who either had no FIDE rating or had a FIDE rating under 2100.
Staking is not exactly unheard of in chess, either. I’ve watched a lot of players at the World Open sell part - or even most - of themselves to raise the entry fee. It happens at lower-tier events a fair amount, too.
As I’ve mentioned I have two options for the FIDE unrated/low rated masters in the A section. Either I don’t allow them to play at all. In which case, the tournament is no longer a grand prix event. Or, I have high entrance fees to discourage them. Last year I picked the former and drew flak for not following the Grand Prix rules and this year I picked the latter and drew flak for an excessive EFs. For the future, I’m not sure which one I’ll pick. This year I will poll the attendees to see how important grand prix points are.
The maximum entrance fee for anyone staying at the hotel is $349. It is less for titled and higher rated players. This leads to the strong field that players need to earn norms. This year I reduced the entrance fees for the lowest rated players to lessen the range of EFs the players pay. I want more people to play in the A section. So, I greatly increased the under xxxx prizes and lowered the under xxxx entrance fees.
One can have tiered entrance fees or have discounts or a combination like I have this year. There is no difference in having a universal entrance fee of $350 with a $150 discount for US IMs or have an entrance fee of $200 for US IMs.
I agree that I should decrease the number of people who don’t have a good fit in either section.
This year’s B section entrance fee for players staying at the hotel is $199.
After this year’s B section I’ll have a much better idea of the interest in this section. This year I just made a guess of what I could hope would show up.
This year we will have the Potomac Open running from August 2-4. It will be one of my standard score-based prize tournaments with seven sections.
Mikhail,
My goal is to create a tournament that everyone can play in. Last year there was no B section. By adding the B section this year, all but around 150 people can pay a reasonable entrance fee. I felt that I had made a big jump for one year and I’m going to work on making it more inclusive.
I just changed the ratings limits for the B section for this year’s Washington International to be less than 2250 USCF and less than 2200 FIDE. This reduces the number of players whose only way to play in the tournament was to pay the higher entrance fees in the A section by 75%.
I’ll be sending in a TLA update tomorrow.
Mike Regan
Thanks for organizing this great event. I will probably have to choose between it and US Open for the latter (Delegate duties), but will be wishing I had come to Maryland.
Lower (B and C) sections didn’t draw very well at the NY International in 2011, but it might work better at the DC area. Anyway, my point is to draw your attention that you can have B section with just the U2200 FIDE rating requirement, without USCF rating restriction. I know such sections have been run in the US before (by CCA, for example), and I think they work just fine. This way, noone would feel excluded by the high entry fees, and the rank-and-file B section players will get a chance to play against some of the masters with lower or no FIDE ratings, who are very often the celebrities in the local chess communities. Like you said though, the latest TLA change will get you most of the way there and is appreciated.