“Relatively small value” is putting words in my mouth that I may or may not have implied.
Regardless, here’s an idea to expand the program, if the EB is interested.
RBO
• no USCF membership requirement
• (alternatively, a nominal $1-3 USCF tournament membership option)
• each affiliate can hold one such event per year
• U1200/UNR only - must be open to all ages
• must be advertised in Chess Life with the words RBO in event name (for free)
• USCF sends all non-member entrants one issue of Chess Life (especially in the nominal EF version)
• rating fees obviously still apply
• not to replace, but rather, to supplement the already existing RBO membership-required events
I know this would be a huge hit in the local club I just joined which has mostly unrated players who are unsure of joining the USCF. I don’t see much if any room for abuse, and a lot of potential for membership activity and growth.
“Must be advertised in Chess Life” strikes me as a counterproductive requirement. Think about a club trying to generate activity in a fairly dead region (like, oh, I don’t know . . . mine, maybe?). For such a club, probably small and young and not supported by a lot of active and involved players, the ~$20 listing fee is steep. It eats into the money that might otherwise be spent on prizes (or paying for the site). Plus, we’re finding that TLAs in Chess Life don’t get people to our events. And why would you expect one to attract new players to an RBO? New players, almost by definition, are those who aren’t so involved in sanctioned chess already that they’d be looking for tournament information in Chess Life. So far, we’re finding that our three most effective sources of event marketing are a regional website, the state association website and word of mouth. Online TLAs are a distant fourth. Even local newspaper calendar announcements have drawn more players (three) to our events than Chess Life TLAs (none).
How many of us found the first tournament we ever played in by looking in the back of Chess Life? Not I. I did use the USCF website to find the nearest club, and then I looked on that club’s website for an event calendar. But Chess Life never entered into it. Until I joined the USCF (after my second tournament), I never even opened an issue.
It seems to me that you advertise in Chess Life if you want to reach players who are already committed and active, not to reach neophytes.
Now, on the other hand, I do think a discounted (nonzero) tournament membership fee could be an excellent idea. A player’s first event should be his gateway drug. We want to give him the product cheap and get him hooked. Instead of $12/$7, perhaps $5/$3. Of course, a lower tournament membership fee means a lower discount when the player signs up for a realio-trulio membership, so no great loss to the USCF there (although, on reflection, this might result in players’ taking longer to decide to take the plunge – I went ahead and joined when I did the math and concluded that I’d come out ahead with a full membership if I played in only four events during the year).
I do like the idea of sending one complimentary issue of Chess Life (or CL4K, depending on age) to each player who acquires an ID through a tournament membership. I don’t see any reason to limit the number of promotional RBOs an affiliate can hold in a year to one. If we really want to push RBOs, there should always be one just around the corner – say, every two or three months.
Not requiring posting in Chess Life makes it a vehicle for non-scrupulous organizers to run a no-membership-required scholastic tournament. They simply run their scholastic, non-member event then submit it, failing to notify the adults they could have played too. Requiring the ad in Chess Life, and I did suggest it continue to be free, makes people realize how open the event should be by design.
“Continue to be free”? Are RBO TLAs normally free? We submitted one for the June issue, and it wasn’t free.
Anyway, it’s my point of view that membership should still be required – only with a reduced price for tournament memberships. That would solve your scammer problem just as well.
In Illinois, there is one weekend a year when a fishing license is not required to fish on most Illinois public waters. I think the idea is to increase interest in fishing and get those of us with licenses to legally take people fishing who don’t. (And, this year, we had a guest from England staying with us over that weekend. She got to fish inland for the very first time. Not to mention it’s the one weekend I can get my wife to come along…) But the idea is that maybe those people who don’t have a license will learn to like fishing enough to purchase a license.
Anyway, I wonder if it would be possible to have a single weekend every year where never-before-rated players could compete without needing even a tournament membership. The following year… they’re not unrated, so they’re ineligible.
(Or maybe something like that has been tried and crashed drastically…) Would keeping it confined to one week out of the year curtail potential abuses? Or would the revenue crash from players who purchase a membership to never play again be devastating?
I think trying to limit affiliates to just one RBO per year might be difficult to monitor and enforce. Conversely, if there are no such limits, and RBOs are also granted some reduced length-of-tournament membership rate, how do we ensure that it is not abused?
I thought the proposal was to keep the RBO rules almost untouched and to enhance them by adding a single USCF-determined date or weekend each year (during national Chess Day weekend?) when an RBO tournament would have a reduced rate tournament membership (possibly even $0) that could only be used by unrated players (making the option available only once per player, since after that they will not be unrated).
In the TD/A tournament upload that may require some additional programming (an additional tournament membership option with a check that the player is unrated and the date is correct). It might require a file of such dates and a validation that the tournament start and end dates were in those dates. Since TD/A wouldn’t necessarily know whether or not a tournament is an RBO, it may be more feasible (for an RBO TM of $0) to simply treat these as exception requests to be manually reviewed. That would eliminate programming changes at the cost of not being able to rate it until the first business day after the tournament (at the earliest).
The other rules for RBOs would likely preclude doing this for National Chess Day 2010, but it might be something to consider for 2011.
I did not see any date restrictions on at least one earlier post advocating the expansion of the RBO option.
If some events qualify for X (whatever X is) and other events do not, how is that to be administered? If it requires an office override of some kind, then TDs should not expect to be able to have their events rated until at least the next working day after their event ends and players will also need to be aware of that.
Recently I’ve seen an inquiry about why an event hasn’t been rated yet that came in on a Wednesday for an event that ended on the previous Sunday.
LaughingVulcan suggested a single weekend for that augmentation of the RBO program. His idea seems like it is worth at least discussing.
I kind of figured that the TD/A upload wouldn’t know whether or not an event was an approved RBO, so that’s why I said it probably couldn’t be rated until manually approved (waiting until at least the first business day after the tournament upload and the processing of the manual exception requests).
You could always have a list of approved RBOs by affiliate and expected chief TD, link the list to TD/A, check for reasonable name changes, affiliate substitutions. or chief TD substitutions, and automatically handle things. Or you could try something simpler and get parents to understand and accept how tie-breaks can give their kid a weaker trophy than a player their kid beat during the tournament.
I think it would be pretty easy to prevent the most abuse by simply making the RBO membership (free or nominal) as a type of membership allowed in the online rating report. The computer then simply tracks whether this type of membership has been used by the affiliate in the last 12 months. A second idea is to have the computer also prevent an event from accepting RBO-memberships if it had an entrant who did not have an u1200 rating in the previous month.
That doesn’t stop confused TDs from submitting a random eligible non-RBO event with RBO-memberships once a year or unscrupulous TDs/organizers from starting an affiliate for just $40 when profitable for the express purpose of getting reduced memberships. With the computer-enforced U1200/UNR restriction, these events should be few and far between. These could easily be policed and sanctioned when noticed (up to and including TD/Affiliate fines and suspension). An important point is that this is not any worse in this enforcement aspect than the JTP-type membership where you rely on the TD’s honesty to say that all the players were K-3 or that they all attend the same school.
The K-3 JTP issue can be caught by the software by checking the ages of the players (TD/A can use birthdates, it just doesn’t display them). The single-school JTP requires using a scholastic affiliate (the school itself).
An RBO requires a TLA, and the TD/A software is probably not linked to the TLAs, and even if it was there can be issues if the name of the event is not exactly the same as the TLA. I’m not sure if the RBO checking can be automated.
One additional advantage of LaughingVulcan’s idea (a single nation-wide date for this type of RBO) is that it even eliminates the possibility of somebody getting multiple affiliates so that one person can run multiple membership-optional RBOs in a year. With only one date available there wouldn’t be the possibility of running such multiples.
As an example, I’ve been authorized to submit reports for as many as six different affiliates, some of whom have organized only a single event each year, and some of whom wouldn’t care if I submitted a different event under their name (at least as long as there was not obligation incurred by them). It is quite plausible that somebody would run multiple RBOs at the same site under different affiliate IDs if there was an incentive to do so.
As one who has submitted many JTP events in the past, I could easily have forged many birthdates. Your single-school safety-net doesn’t work since you don’t submit school name on the rating report - the USCF relies on the honesty of the TD that all players do indeed attend the school.
The bad part of the single date is that it may not work out for all clubs. Some clubs meet on a particular weekday, and a Saturday date would be pointless. If you expand “a single date” to a week you increase enforcement costs and it still may be a bad time of year for some clubs (during their low-attendance season, on the same day as a local scholastic, while their TD was out-of-town on work). We should give the affiliates the flexibility this membership-enhancement program deserves.
A K-3 JTP event with falsified birth dates would still require that ALL participants have birth dates (real or falsified) that make sense. Unless the event is small or private or primarily K-3 with any older players having falsified birth dates, it is unlikely to pass the automatic checks.
I haven’t run a K-12 single-school JTP, but there is probably a city and/or zip code check that limits the chances of slipping one through (maybe a multi-school but single-town event might get by). It would still require a scholastic affiliate for the school that it is supposed to be for.
Those checks would not be available for a faux RBO event.
You and I have no clue if it does flag a JTP event based on birth dates. Also, the event is likely to be small or private, just like many of the RBOs and several of the potential fake RBOs. I’ve run tons of single-school JTPs ever since I was in high school for our school club, and throughout the last decade as a teacher - that includes one magnet school, a private school, and a Catholic school - zip-code checks would have been useless, and I could have easily invited players from the neighborhood school to play in our “single-school” events. (Note, please let nothing said in this or my previous post be construed as I actually did anything unethical - I did not.) Please accept this - JTPs are easy to practice fraud on if you want to be unscrupulous - and further talk just derails the main point of the thread.
Edit: had the word ‘fake’ in a place where I didn’t intend it to be.
Remember that there is no single-school requirement for K-3 (Primary) JTP events, any USCF afflliate can run one.
K-12 in-school JTP events are a separate matter. The USCF does rely upon the honesty of the scholastic affiliate and submitting TD when submitting K-12 in-school JTP events that the participants are all students at that school.
Of course, the USCF relies upon the honesty of its TDs and affiliates when submitting other types of rating reports, too.
Similarly, the USCF relies upon all affiliates, TDs and individuals to provide accurate information (such as birthdates) when submitting USCF memberships.
While we do check birthdates on both types of JTP events for reasonableness, we do have to allow for some flexibility in the ages of the players.
My experience has been that events that don’t require USCF membership usually do little to promote USCF membership. The original beginners tournaments promoted by USCF in the 1970s did not require membership, but unlike the above at least had a requirement that players scoring at least 75% would win a membership. I ran both types of events and found that requiring membership produced many more members than awarding membership prizes, but I’m sure that even the latter would be more effective than only distributing sample issues of Chess Life.
Here is a USCF house ad from the January 1992 Chess Life, reflecting a policy that was far more successful than beginner events without membership required, and I suspect would still help to promote membership today (I now prefer Under 1000 to Under 1200). Online submission has replaced disk, affiliates now get up to 8 TLA lines free for an RBO, but rating is no longer free and maybe it should be.
Bill Goichberg
RATED BEGINNERS OPENS
UNDER 1200? UNRATED? These events are for you! Consult state listings each month for details. OVER 1200? Please tell your friends about RBOs. Many players are ready to try tournaments, but don’t read Chess Life. Help local organizers and USCF build American chess!
ORGANIZERS: Hold RBOs together with other events- you have nothing to lose! Affiliates get four free lines each month for RBO Tournament Life Announcements, there is no minimum rating fee, and rating is FREE if submitted in disk form, using a program supplied by USCF. The only requirements are that the event be titled “Rated Beginners Open” and be open to Under 1200 or unrated. Of course, USCF membership is required.
PROMOTE USCF MEMBERSHIP! The average RBO is more than twice as large, in entries and new members, as the average nonrated beginners event. A 4/91 Philadelphia RBO drew 32 players and attracted 17 new members, 11 of them adults!
The average USCF event has 19 players and is four rounds long. Let’s round that up to 20 players. That means there are 40 ratable games if there are no byes or forfeits.
40 * 25 cents/game = $10. While a $10 loss in rating report revenue for an RBO might not seem like much, neither is a $10 decrease in expenses for most tournaments, especially if the RBO is just one section of an event.
I’m really more concerned with implementation aspects, something that causes the rating of an event to be delayed by one if not several days might have negative P/R value. And if the organizer has to jump through multiple hoops to get a waiver of the ratings fee (especially if it is just for one section), it might prove to be more bother than it is worth.
Bill, you disagree on experience grounds. But do you agree the underlying psychology is good? I have a hard time imagining that having a local player play one RBO per year won’t want to join the USCF on a more permanent basis more often than not. Or at least enough for the program to be revenue even (as opposed to those players who would have joined the USCF anyways without such an RBO experience). The rating psychology is just so addictive. Which, in your experience, of these assumptions is wrong or what non-mentioned factor made the free/reduced RBO program a failure?
If I were running these, I would not have membership awards as prizes. They seem counterintuitive as the winner is the player in the event most likely to want to join the USCF anyway (alternately, he/she may already have an u1200 rating and be a USCF member). Leave the prizes to the organizer and their club. Run an event and see if people can wait a whole year before playing in their next event. Some will. But enough others to make the program profitable will want to join up I think.
Edit: Also, Bill, with regards to your experience in this issue, was much of it attached to small club events?
Edit2: Also, doesn’t the program deserve to be tried outside the auspices of the Fischer boom?
When a player is interested in playing in a tournament and obtaining his first rating, that is the time to require membership, as the cost will rarely be a negative factor sufficient to discourage him (the time he needs to devote is likely much more of a barrier than the cost). Instead, if the player plays in an event without joining, he may or may not ever become a member. The idea of building up his interest so that he will eventually join is fallacious- if he is ready to spend time playing in a tournament, he is probably ready to join now, and by waiting we run the risk that he will take up a different hobby, and/or do less well than expected in that first tournament, so will no longer be as interested in joining.
Without membership prizes, beginners events without membership required would have accomplished even less for USCF. While it’s true that those who score well are most likely to join on their own, many of these will never join, and an even larger percentage of those who do poorly will never join. The assumption that lack of a membership requirement will significantly promote entries is wrong, so there is no reason to not require membership.
Also, affiliates should be encouraged to offer USCF membership prizes, and even renewals help the federation, as the player might not have renewed otherwise (especially, the renewal rate is poor for those who have been members only a year).
Partly small club events, but at least as important were side events at major tournaments. Also, I have noticed that in areas in which the scholastics are not USCF rated, very few of the kids ever join USCF. And giving them a rating without requiring them to join doesn’t help, as we saw from the failure of the JTP program in 1988-1991. It’s actually better to hold a nonrated event than one that issues USCF ratings without requiring membership, as the latter practice removes one of the main reasons why players join USCF. But best of all is simply a USCF rated event with membership required.
The USCF nonrated beginners program, as well as RBOs, were not tried during the Fischer boom. NRBs were started in 1976 and ended about 1994, and RBOs started about 1990.
Not to mention it’s the one weekend I can get my wife to come along…) But the idea is that maybe those people who don’t have a license will learn to like fishing enough to purchase a license.
Or you could try something simpler and get parents to understand and accept how tie-breaks can give their kid a weaker trophy than a player their kid beat during the tournament. 