Don’t be so sure about that. Someone in the northwest suburbs may be able to get to Freeport faster than they could get to downtown Chicago or the south side. Freeport is only about 90 minutes away once you get to I-90.
And then there’s the opportunity to face new players rather than the same crowd.
We used to run tournament at a local fast food place in Lincoln on Sundays, small entry fees, small prizes, but we got players from South Dakota on several occasions and a couple of times folks came from Des Moines, a good 200 miles away.
That’s a sure way to discourage attendance. Nobody believes “based-on” prizes, because everybody has been to lots of events where the based-on fell short, and to few where it didn’t.
Use a Plus-Score format. That way, the prize fund automatically expands or contracts with the turnout, yet each prize is still guaranteed.
As far a cost for a site goes, have you tried the village of Freeport itself for a possible cheap or free site? Another possibility would be the local shopping mall. By giving you room for your tournament in the mall, in turn the mall gets additional traffic from the chess players & likely additional sales at the food court. Considering how some malls and retail shops have been doing in the past 2 years there may be plenty of space. I even know of 1 mall in the south suburbs of Chicago that has space in it that is used by the local park district. It will help if you can get a local official behind your club. Also, maybe offer to provide a free chess simul or ehibition at some town event as a ‘quid-pro-quo’ for the use of space. This might be a good way to spark further interest in your club in the area.
I did once play in a tournament held in a suburban [of New Orleans] mall where the tables were set up in the open area near one of the anchor stores. It was suprisingly quiet, and the few people that passed by were considerate in not making noise and keeping it to a minimum.
I believe I already mentioned the park district and the public library. The city of Freeport is not rolling in real estate. There’s no community center, for example.
That would be in Rockford.
You may be overestimating the size of Freeport. It doesn’t even belong to a metropolitan area.
(Actually, there is a sort-of-mall in town, all but abandoned for a long time but now beginning to show minor signs of resurgent life, but I personally find it a disturbing place and don’t like to go in there.)
We have our club in a Borders Books. They have allowed us to hold several small weekend one day tournaments in the cafe area, providing us with some extra tables and stack chairs. Of course this was after they got to see that we were making them money on our club night and that we were not going to be noisy. Cost: $0 for use of the cafe. But make sure you have people buy food and drinks in the store and not have the place littered with McDonald’s bags.
Instead of cash prizes we give Borders gift cards, a nice selling point to Borders. Parents also prefer we give gift cards than money or trophies. Our events have been small, but sometimes very strong with experts and Class A’s along with unrateds and little kids. We also have door prizes. Everybody usually leaves with something. Borders has been very good to our club, so we make sure to be good to them by scheduling way in advance and cleaning up after ourselves.
A couple of other ideas, maybe… Does Parks & Rec have any recreation facilities? The Golf course? And/or the local business community? Freeport’s publicity videos talks about General Casualty and also Honeywell, among others. I’m not saying they’d have anything adequate, just thinking possibilities. Any vacancies in the downtown area where you could host a tourney (akin to the mall idea above)? Could either the Convention & Visitors Bureau or the Chamber of Commerce help?
Another idea that I have used: Wait until after the tournament to chose whether you will take a TD fee. Or run the first couple for free, then start giving yourself a fee if it is working well.
You need to go back and reread, my friend. I already discussed the park district buildings and linked to the convention and visitors’ bureau.
The public golf course doesn’t have any rentable facility. Out of curiosity, I checked the Freeport Country Club, and I was surprised to find an appropriately sized room for $75 – though on the flip side, we’d almost certainly have to use the club’s food service, which wouldn’t be cheap.
A follow-up: We ended up holding two events simultaneously – a 5/SS RBO with a $10 entry fee and a 4/SS open with a $20 entry fee – and using the proceeds of the former to enhance the latter’s prize fund. We also lucked out, in that the college where we play bumped us to an alternate room, then charged us $40 less for it. (We liked the alternate room enough that we may in future choose it over the room we’d originally asked for.) Because of the subsidy from the RBO, we were able to advertise prizes equaling 75 percent of entries. The upshot: $218 in entry fees, $175 paid out in prizes (we rounded up a bit), $50 for the room, $18 for rating fees and $32 for trophies for the RBO, for a net loss of $57. While it would have been nice to come out ahead, that loss was within our ability to absorb.
I’m considering trying out plus-score prizes for our next iteration of this tournament. If we take the room fee, rating fees and trophies as fixed costs, we want to net $100 or better. Smythe Dakota suggests a $100/$50/$25/$10 payout schedule, but that might seem stingy in an eight-player field in which the top two scorers won only three games apiece and the third scored 2.5. I’m looking at a less steeply graduated $85/$50/$30/$20 schedule, which closely resembles the $85/$55/$35 place prizes from our open* and which allows any positive scorer to at least break even on his entry fee. If we’d used this prize schedule in our open, we’d have paid out $80 in prizes and netted $38 on the day – though I’d still feel a little weird giving only $30 to our first-place finishers. (Then again, if the prize fund hadn’t been subsidized by the RBO, it would have been $84 altogether, divided $55/$30 after rounding, and the top finishers would have gotten $42.50 apiece, while the third-place finisher would have gotten nothing. So maybe $30/$30/$20 is within reasonable bounds.)
Because of the tie for first place, the actual payouts were $70/$70/$35 – on the generous side for an eight-player field. But because of our remote location, we felt we needed an attractive prize fund to entice players to travel out our way.)
Sounds encouraging. It takes time to build/rebuild chess in an area that hasn’t had much.
Some folks are trying to get chess going in Lincoln NE again, too. Now that I’ve stepped down from running the Cornhusker State Games every year, I may offer to direct an event or two for them, if only to keep my TD certification current. Also, I’ve seen what happens when someone becomes ‘expected’ to run all the events with no relief watch.
I just got carried away watching the very nice little “video tourbooks” on the City of Freeport website.