Let’s say a TD specifies that entries postmarked before, say, 5/1 are eligible for a discounted EF. Let’s also say that a couple of out-of-state entries arrive where the checks are dated 5/1 but the postmark is 5/3. Should this hypothetical TD attempt to collect the on-site entry fee as opposed to the early entry fee from these players?
Thoughts and advice are welcome.
The TD is entitled to collect the late fee, but I’ve never done that in the tournaments that I’ve directed. If an entry is mailed so late that I haven’t received it by the day of the tournament, though, I might make the player pay the door entry fee, to be refunded if/when the mailed entry arrives. I suppose in a really outrageous case I might charge the door entry fee for a player who mailed his entry, e.g. if the letter were postmarked the day of the tournament or later.
As the hypothetical organizer, I would lean toward upholding the advertised conditions, for the sake of fairness. If the advertisement clearly gives a postmark deadline, then it’s really up to the player to make sure his mailed entry complies with that deadline to receive the discount.
That said, I wouldn’t say this is a completely rigid position. For example, if I know there was bad weather on 5/1 in the area(s) where these checks were mailed, that may well change my outlook.
For this and other reasons, I would recommend retaining any mailed documents, including envelopes with intact postmarks. Also, if I were planning to collect additional money on site (be it for membership renewal, EF underpayment, or some other reason), I would try to contact the player prior to the tournament if at all possible.
Technically, it would be the organizer (affiliate) that determines details such as entry fees and conditions for receiving discounts, not the TD. On the other hand, for a fair number of events, the organizer and TD are one and the same.
In any case, this seems to be a decision left entirely to the organizer’s discretion. The organizer would be well within his rights to demand the difference between the advance entry fee and the on-site entry fee, since the conditions for qualifying for the discount were clearly not met. On the other hand, what would be the point, other than to annoy the out-of-state players?
In my opinion, the purpose of the deadline for the advance entry fee is to motivate procrastinators to enter in advance sufficiently ahead of time that the organizer/director does not have to deal with an onslaught of last minute entries the day (or night) before a tournament begins. If an entry is mailed, the deadline should be set far enough in advance of the start of the tournament to offer a reasonable expectation that the entry is actually received in time.
Let’s say you set the deadline on Sunday, a week before the tournament start. A player can drop his entry into the mailbox in front of the post office on Saturday, the day before the deadline. The box might not be opened until Monday morning and postmarked on that day. This is a fairly common practice. Some leeway should be given to the player. If not, why should he ever come back to play in your event?
Some points to consider:
If you’re basing the late fee on the postmark date, that’s already being more understanding than some people would be. I’ve participated in swim meets, for example, in which entries had to be received (not postmarked) by a certain date (e.g., 8 days before the meet) in order to be accepted (not to avoid a late fee). I once even had an entry rejected which (due to an oversight) I hadn’t mailed until the morning of the day before it was due (and what made this really tacky was that they didn’t inform me my entry had been rejected until the day before the meet - 8 days after I had mailed it).
May 3rd instead of May 1st is a pretty significant error (assuming that May 2nd wasn’t a Sunday). Even if the person didn’t realize what time the last mail pickup of the day was going to be done, that would at most account for it being postmarked one day late.
How much leeway you give entrants is up to you, but be aware that if you don’t charge a late fee even though the entrant had to have known they were mailing their entry late, this may encourage them to send in their entries late for future tournaments, whereas if you enforce the deadline as advertised, they will probably be careful in the future to mail their entry on time.
If you are planning to charge a late fee and they provided you with an email address, you should send them a friendly reminder of how much extra they will owe when they come to the tournament.
Bob
‘Hypothetically,’ the cutoff date was 5/10 (Saturday) and the postmarks are 5/12 (Monday). Given the discussion here, I think leniency might be warranted in this specific case.
Thanks to all for taking the time to read and comment.
Saturday is a poor choice for a ‘postmark by’ date, because mail collection from postal drop boxes is often earlier than the rest of the week and there is often no collection on Sunday.
Moreover, the whole point to an early deadline is so that the entries arrive early enough that there isn’t a last minute rush to verify those players’ membership status and rating and get them entered into the computer (since nearly all events use a computer for pairing.) If you’ve got the entries by Wednesday or even Thursday for an event that doesn’t start until Saturday, the early entry deadline has pretty much accomplished its task, even if the postmark is Monday or even Tuesday.
Lazy, late, and forgetful are three characteristics of chess players. I remember running a tournament one time that was well advertised through TLA, flyers, announcements at the chess league, and word of mouth for three months. Two experts walked into the club and were surprised that a tournament was taking place that weekend. They were really miffed that no one told them about it. I had given each of them a flyer two weeks before the tournament and suggested they enter in advance. Being an organizer is so much fun. 
Online entries avoid such issues.
I suspect your two experts wanted the red carpet treatment. Chess players are quite good actors at times.
No, they were serious. They really had forgotten the tournament was being held. They were also oblivious to the flyers posted on the tournament billboard in the club. They were at the club every club day to play blitz. One was a doctor who carried a couple of phones and a pager that he could not turn off because of his practice. They played in most of the tournaments, entering most of the time on site on game day.
True. But the major purveyor of online entries is scandalously expensive, and the alternative - Paypal - also is fee-laded, even if to a smaller extent.
Question: who is the major purveyor? I use square and eat the 2.75% charge.
Alex Relyea
Square is just a credit card processor (so is Paypal), it takes more than that to handle online entries for tournaments.
Correction: Square also runs some kind of webstore system (and there are others out there), but how much tournament-specific information they can collect (such as USCF ID and section) is unclear, and they don’t have the ability to check USCF membership status, rating eligibility, etc.
That would be onlineregistration.cc. Their pricing is (imho) vastly unrealistic for clubs like mine and/or once a year events (like the one I’m hypothetically running this weekend).
Our organizers used this for our 50th Greater Peoria Open. Personally I was out of town, but it seemed to have worked fine.
It might be worth exploring at the very least.
Some of these have more than one fee structure and may have varying structures for processing CC fees.
I believe the first two check the online information for the player with USCF and provide the current rating, etc. for your entry file, and then download a file you can import.
onlineregistration.cc/
(The reports I have are that it is $20/month, subtracted from final bill for the month at $1/player - PLUS CC processing fee) works with SwissSys, some people have reported works less well with WinTD) This report of charges could be wrong - rumor is they will negotiate.
Events4chess events4chess.com/
($1 fee for online entry passed on to the player, processes through PayPal including guest checkout, PayPal fee: 2.9% + 30¢ per transaction)
I think on the following you have to enter the player data yourself.
Eventbee eventbee.com
($1- $2 + CC processing fee) and
Eventbrite eventbrite.com
(2.5% + 99¢ per ticket + 3% CC processing fee )
Eventzilla eventzilla.net
$1 per ticket + CC processing fee.
Also check out wufoo.com
What number of advanced entries do you think would be necessary to justify using these various paying systems?
Our club has never used advanced entries as part of its registration process. In the past, when I directed for other chess clubs, the number of advanced registrations was never more than 40% of the total entries. Even with registrations on site, it never seemed to affect the timing of pairing of a first round by more than 10 minutes.
I can see requiring advance entry if you need to have a bigger room or more tables and chairs, but for the most part this seems to be unnecessary for many local organizers and another reason for a player to reject playing in a tournament. In this era of work, players may not know that they can play until the day of the event. I would rather give them the option of playing rather than punishing them with an extra fee.
As a player, if I see that an event has a $10 or more on site entry fee compared to the advanced entry fee, I ignore the tournament. I am a fairly active player and will put up with a lot, but a large disparity between the advance and the on site fee leaves me cold. For that extra money, I can do other things, like go to a movie or buy a double mushroom pizza.
A lot depends on the size of the tournament and the potential players. When I do a 120-player tournament I much prefer being able to handle the 105 advance entries before the morning of the tournament.
At one extreme you have the national scholastics. Last weekend’s national elementary had 2224 advance entries, a guesstimate of another 20 at the door, Thursday tornadoes running through the Dallas area causing flight delays and cancellations, and 2212 actually playing. If even 10% of those 2200 had been entered on site then there would have been a significant headache getting everyone in properly and getting the pairings out on time. Make it 30% and the pairings may have been delayed.
At the other extreme are our club events where I don’t bother entering people until about a half hour before they start and I’m still fine because the numbers are small.