How do we restart tournament chess and get the word out?

Running Chess Tournaments
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(Note, this is an expanded version of a post I wrote in another topic that seems to have gotten buried.)

At some point, it will be possible to restart OTB tournament chess. But how will that work?

Most scholastic events are associated with the players’ schools, and getting chess going again might not be the highest priority at schools when they’re permitted to reopen, hopefully on time for the 2020-21 school year. I think scholastic chess will do OK, though.

But what about adult events?

Grand Prix events (currently) have to be advertised in Chess Life, so there’s about a two month lead time for those events. The EB could waive that provision for a while, like until 2021, but there’s still the need to get the word out.

Moreover, anyone who uses hotel space for their events might either have hotels falling over themselves to make deals or find no rooms at the inn because of re-scheduled weddings, bar mitzvahs, meetings and conferences.

This leads to the question, what other things could US Chess be working on NOW in order to help organizers get their events promoted quickly when that time comes?

I think email blasts work fairly well, but the fact of the matter is that we only have email addresses for around 76% of current members. Among adults in the 20-64 age groups, we have email addresses for around 90% of the active players.

The percentages are lowest for life members, seniors (65 and older) and group membership plan members.

Also, 5-10% of members have requested to be excluded from affiliate blasts announcing tournaments.

Moreover, our tracking data shows that usually no more than 30% of emails get read. Maybe the recipients see the subject header and that’s sufficient to know if they have enough interest in an event to read it, but it is also possible that a large percentage of them get filtered out after they leave our server.

That means that in many case 75% or more of the potential players for an event either aren’t reachable or may not get around to reading the email.

The web might be an easier vehicle for getting the word out on events.

The current online TLA system is kind of cumbersome to use. (It wasn’t really designed for getting the word out quickly.) At some point, it’ll be rewritten, but that’s likely to be a year or more in the future. Do we need something sooner than that, even if it might be replaced in a year or two?

One possibility I’ve been kicking around with staff is the idea of some kind of simplified tournament calendaring system, where organizers could start by indicating what days they’re thinking about holding events, then update that when the event is ‘booked’. And it could be used for last minute announcements about changes such as the ones we’ve been seeing for the last month.

By limiting what information is permitted to basics like dates and city/state and selected status information, plus links to the affiliate’s or state association’s site for more detailed information, we might be able to bypass having entries screened by staff before they’re available, which can take anywhere from a few minutes to several days. We could provide check boxes to indicate what type of event it is.

If it is done well, it might take organizers only a minute or two to enter their events into the calendar.

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We should not let the perfect be the enemy of the good.

E-mail blasts would be the first layer. Minimizing ad requirements might help get events started, but organizers will need to time to, well, organize, and will want time enough to get people to show up to play. Getting an event out too quickly to get it advertised well will increase risk.

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In Northern California, about a half dozen organizations host 95% of tournaments. Each has a website, a Facebook page and an email list. That’s also true about the major organizers in Southern California and Nevada, plus the Continental Chess Association. New and smaller organizers usually publicize their events at the established tournaments.

Frankly, the US Chess TLA page is actually the last place I go to find tournaments, unless I’m inclined to hope on an airplane. I am a bit surprised this is not the case elsewhere.

Michael Aigner

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One advantage we have is that we’re likely to know well in advance of a tournament date whether it’s going to be possible to hold the tournament. I have a tournament scheduled for June, but I obviously can’t know at this point whether it’s going to be possible to hold it. But if it were cancelled, it would be because the government hasn’t given authorization for events that size to be held, which potential attendees would be likely to know about, or because the facility chooses not to allow it, which the facility would presumably inform us of in advance. I’ve also found that a lot of the attendees at a tournament are people who have come to our tournaments before, and since I ask attendees to give us their email addresses (which most do but a few don’t), I can therefore email a high percentage of our attendees. And many of our first-timers have either emailed me in advance or are being brought by coaches whose contact information I have.

One thing I’ve been thinking a lot about is that when tournament-sized gatherings are allowed again, there are still likely to be social distancing rules in place. I doubt that it would be realistically possible for OTB play to occur with the opponents remaining 6 feet apart, so I would expect that we’d have to require the players to wear face coverings while playing. I also expect that we’d want to have plenty of hand cleansing materials around, and require that players sanitize their hands before each game to insure that nobody is touching pieces and clock buttons with hands that could be contaminated. And I’d expect to have to control access to refreshment tables, so that people are maintaining safe distances from one another and are sanitizing their hands before touching anything.

Another consideration is likely to be crowd size. We might, at least initially, be limited to no more than 50 attendees, and that number is likely to include players, spectators, TDs, and other tournament staff. And I don’t think we want to have people coming all the way to a tournament only to find out that they can’t get in, or that a player’s family member(s) can’t be there with them.

I should add that these procedures are likely to be important, not just to comply with government guidelines, but also to reassure both the facilities and the potential attendees that we’re keeping attendees safe.

Bob

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Tongs.

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It is possible that face masks may become an every-day thing in the USA, like they’ve been in Japan for a decade or more. They don’t have to be medical grade ones to have some efficacy.

My wife has made several dozen face masks in the past two weeks, some for us but most for friends who, unlike us, have to work outside the home.

The indications at this point are that it’s going to be a while before group activities get restarted, and then it’ll probably be a slow ramp-up. I think the 2020 baseball season may not get started, and the 2020 football season is looking a bit dicey.

I did see an interesting report today, they tested NYC maternity patients and 88% of the ones who tested positive had no symptoms. If that trend extends to the general populace, we may reach herd immunity (usually cited at 60%) faster than some models project.

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Besides social media, tournament clearinghouses, and club websites, on the local scene we could get the word out the old fashioned way, sending out flyers by mail. Before the internet, much of the time organizers would mail out flyers for upcoming events. Stacks of flyers would be set out at various tournament sites and at local clubs. Posting would be made on the bulletin boards at grocery stores, libraries, senior citizen centers, and at schools. That takes time, energy, and money for postage. New contacts would be made. More emphasis on keeping a list of names and addresses. Have discounts noted if they brought the flyer to registration or sent it back with advance entry. I was taught to put a flyer in the hand of every players as they left a venue. The personal service led many of them to come back. On the local level, the chess world is a real community and will respond to effort and personalized messaging. Maybe I am old school, but when an organizer sent me a flyer and a note, I usually went to his event.

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Mailing flyers gets expensive in large metro areas.

There are about 300 active players within 50 miles of downtown Pittsburgh reachable by postal mail, you could postal mail them all for somewhere around $200, depending on how much of the work you can do yourself.

There are about 5700 within 50 miles of downtown NYC. Different ball game, you either need to fine tune who you’re mailing it to or you need to find a less expensive medium.

If you know who your regulars are and already have email addresses for them, you’re in great shape. Not sure everybody is.

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I used to mail flyers to clubs in the region for them to post for their members to see. Often I would take a stack of flyers with me and place them at a tournament I attended. I would count how many were left. Certain individuals were mailed a flyer because I knew they would copy them and give it to others. I kept track of registrations, addresses, and the number of events they played in. Some of these would get a numbered flyer with a discount noted if they entered and event. When other people found out I was doing this, they asked me to put them on the “special” list. This was an indication they were motivated to play in our events.

When I ended up running another club, our little club had a website created. I would have pdfs made of all of the events on our calendar so that anyone could download a flyer. Our membership list of over 200 let me send out e-mails to all on the list. If you played in an event, you were added to the list. This limited our spending on postage. I figured that three or four entries would cover all costs of copying, mailing, and all forms of advertising. If people sent me flyers, I would advertise their events to our club membership list, too, via general e-mail blasts.

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If you build it, they will come.

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Ah, the Emerson fallacy.

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Not always
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravina_Island_Highway

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Sometimes I put in a highway to nowhere when I play SimCity. :smiling_imp:

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You didn’t have to go all the way to Alaska. There’s one in Illinois: abandonedraillines.com/2019 … ssway.html

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We are a long way from OTB chess in most areas - and some who think they are ready will likely find a resurgence which will shut them back down.

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That’s what ‘flattening the curve means’. I doesn’t mean new cases go away, it means keeping their numbers below the point where they overwhelm health care systems. Somehow the media can’t or won’t understand that point.

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I find most of the media understand that just fine. I observe that some governors do not appear to understand it.

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I lived in Waukegan where this highway was visible from my windows on a bluff, where my home was located, above the roadway. It has been the sight of many movies. My favorite so far has been “Groundhog Day.” Many a local kid used this road for drag racing. This structure has been viewed in my then yard by chess personalities Bachler, Fred Gruenberg, Helen and Jim Warren, and Tim Redman.

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Yet they seem surprised when one explains that the duration of the disease increases. Frankly, I don’t think most of the media understand it. But I’ve felt that way about the media since the 1980s, when Chicago Mayor Harold Washington had a heart attack. In their live coverage, it quickly became apparent that two highly respected and nationally known members of the Chicago Media - Bill Curtis and Walter Jacobsen, had no idea what a heart attack actually was.

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Without using any research resources, including the Internet, could you write an accurate one paragraph description of what a ‘heart attack’ is?

I’m not sure I could, and my wife and I have both been under the care of a cardiologist for several years, as has our oldest son.