I’ve just returned to chess after a 25 year layoff. I’d like to be active in tournaments, but I’ve recently moved to Athens Ohio from Columbus and there is very little chess activity here. When I was in Columbus, there were many chess clubs and tournaments.
Ohio University here in Athens has a chess club with no support from the University, no dues, and very few members who belong to USCF. I’d like to get some activity going here so I got my club TD certification. I’m willing to pay the affiliate fee for the OU club, but I’m not sure how to do it. Do I have to be an officer of the club to do that? If I get started slowly, with some weekend quads for example, would I be able to submit the results if I round up 3 other UCSF members? It’s all a bit confusing, complicated by the fact that I don’t have any tournament software to prepare .dbf dbase files. (Although I’m pretty handy with MS Access and could probably manufacture the files if I had to.)
Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.
For small tournaments, you do not need pairing software to submit rating reports online. You can create the rating report manually, filling in the “wall chart” for the section in the provided form. For a quad, this should take very little time.
You are closer to holding your first tournament than you might suspect; the key, of course, is getting together a core group of players/club members. That’s the hard part, in the chess boonies—and if there is a good guidebook on how to do it, I have not seen it.
The technical stuff to get set up and certified to hold and submit rated events takes time and can be frustrating—but it’s a one-time thing. Once you sign on all the dotted lines you are good to go.
You do not need pairing software to run small tournaments and submit them online for rating. Please get a copy of the 5th Edition of the USCF Rulebook and read it carefully. Also see the updates to the rules since the 5th Edition was published: uschess.org/docs/gov/reports … hanges.pdf
Here is where you can sign up—today—as an affiliate for $40 a year: is.gd/Jg4PMz
Once you do that, and get your affiliate ID number, you are set: You are a USCF member with an established rating, a certified TD (who owns and reads the Rulebook) and an affiliate. Then comes the fun part:
Let us hope you saved the PIN from the email confirming your membership. It is also on your copy of Chess Life or the tournament booklet you get in place of CL if you chose Regular membership. You will need the PIN to access the Members Only Area—which is unforgivably hard to find from the USCF home page. Here is a link: secure2.uschess.org/MembersOnly/MO_login.php
The real fun part: You must set up separate log-in IDs and passwords, one as an affiliate and one as a TD. Take a deep breath—and save your log-ins and passwords somewhere safe. (I keep mine ‘stored’ in my browser’s memory, but cyber-security mavens frown on that, with good reason.)
Take as many deep breaths as needed to get through the cumbersome process of setting up your TD and Affiliate log-ins…and once that’s done, you are set.
To submit tournaments for rating, log into the TD/A Support Area: secure2.uschess.org/TD_Affil/TD_login.phpas a TD. Scroll down to Tournament Rating Reports, click on the link…and welcome to the dark side. The first time will be similar to your first half-hour with the Chronos clock manual…once you get the hang of it, it’s bliss.
To authorize yourself (and other TDs) to submit rated events under the ID of your affiliate, log onto TD/A as an affiliate. There you can set up club officers, authorized TDs, contact info and other fun stuff. If you submit a Tournament Life Announcement (TLA) for an upcoming event, you must do so as an affiliate, not a TD.
Have you checked out any of the other nearby chess clubs? The closest one to Athens is probably the Mid Ohio Valley club in the Vienna/Parkersburg, WV area. It is a pretty active club that sponsors a few USCF rated tournaments a year. You might be able to build up a good linkage between your club and theirs to hold tournaments or to advertise your events.
Thanks for the helpful posts. I already have a TD login and I do drive down to Parkersburg for the Mid Ohio Valley meetings. In fact, I set myself up as a club TD just so I could help Matt Richardson set up a tournament here in Athens. But I thought I had to already be a club officer to set up as an affiliate. (I guess I could get the guys there to agree to give me a title - how about CRTO - Chief Red Tape Officer?)
The bigger problem, of course, is that I went to the OU club meeting last night and there was only one USCF member there. But one can hope, and the process doesn’t sound all that daunting so I’ll give it a shot.
Again, thanks for all the help. Knowing how responsive everyone has been, I’m very confident we can pull this off.
Sorry for my naive questions, but do I have to affiliate my club to run a local tournament, or is do I just have to be an affiliate to get a Chess Life tournament announcement?
So I ran the demographic query, but didn’t see the results of the search. How do I access the results of the query (i.e. the list of members in my area)?
The demographic search tool only gives totals, if you want the individual members, you will need to order mailing labels or an email blast from the USCF office, and members who have requested that they be excluded from those services will not be included.
Thus someone might see that there are 50 members meeting a given criteria (such as a ZIP code radius) but that only 30 of them would be included in an email blast and only 25 of them would be included in a set of mailing labels.
The demographics search tool was recently modified to indicate how many of those can ONLY be reached via email or in mailing labels:
Total Records 60 (approximate)
Members who have opted out of affiliate emailings or 3rd party mailing address labels, respectively, are not included in the counts shown below.
Email Addresses 33 (unique email addresses)
Email Addresses only (no mailing labels) 10 (unique email addresses)
Mailing Addresses 45
Mailing Addresses Only (no email) 17
OK, got it, although the query returned 10 records withing 50 miles of my zip. I must be doing something wrong, but I’ll worry about that if and when the time comes. So can I register our club as an affiliate without being an officer, or do I have to get them to make me an officer?
AFAIK, only a club can be an affiliate. You cannot be an affiliate, though you can be a USCF member and a tournament director. So your club will have to become an affiliate in order for you to run a USCF-rated tournament.
Check your search parameters carefully, especially the membership status and last activity fields.
You should find around 60 current members living within 50 miles of Athens.
There are members in the area, and recently lapsed members, just not as many that have played in tournaments recently. That’s not unusual if there hasn’t been an active affiliate/TD nearby running events lately.
If you create a NEW affiliate, presumably you would be an officer of it.
If you want to revive an existing but lapsed affiliate, then you’ll need to work with the office, as the list of officers is likely out of date. (This can sometimes get kind of sticky, as we HAVE had attempts by people to hijack an affiliate, so the office usually insists on having authorization from a currently listed officer before updating the officer records.)