TDAC deliberately changed the activity requirements to include working at a tournament without requiring being listed as a chief or chief assistant of the tournament or section. There are a number of Club and Local level TDs that work the floor of events but do not handle overall chief-like duties. There are also Senior level TDs that support other TDs without needing to receive any credit and do not take on many chief-like roles. The change was made to reflect that reality and to make it easier to get people for such support roles.
Requiring a minimum number of players before allowing a chief assistant would slow down TDs trying to move from Club to Local and would make it more tedious to enter the assistant in the new MUIR upload.
Mike, the first paragraph addressed whether or not to require chief/chief assistant for activity.
The second addressed the separate issue of whether or not to require a minimum number for chief assistant. That would slow the move from Club to Local and would be of uncertain necessity since there is already a requirement that the tournaments have a combined total number of players of 50 or more.
Advancement credits are just a subset, sometimes a small subset, of activity credits.
An ANTD working a category D event gets activity credit (6 events in six years to auto-renew ANTD certification due to activity) but a category D has no effect on advancement to NTD. A quads tournament is activity but useless for advancement for anybody.
There may be more TDs at an event that there are chief/chief assistant spots. The National Elementary has 13 sections and thus room for 1 chief, 1 chief assistant, 13 section chiefs and 13 section chief assistants. That is 28 different people that can get one of those (probably only 6-8 different section chiefs so the actual number is the number of section chiefs plus 15). There may be as many as 90 different TDs that will be working the floor or back room, so almost 70 will only be getting activity credit with the remainder getting chief/chief assistant credit for either the overall event or for a section.
Mike, my club runs non-rated ladders with 1vs2 pairings among the players that show up, but playing four other people before being paired against the same person again (drops to two other people in the final two months of the annual ladder season). Standings are sorted by most points scored, then most games among those with the same points, then accumulative score if still tied. One ladder game per weekly meeting.
That promotes activity and competitive games.
Current top 12 standings (at the season’s midpoint) are:
Back when I was the President of the Lincoln Chess Club, I wanted to run some ladders but we never really had the critical mass it takes for one to work, and then bughouse came along and that’s about all anyone wanted to play.
Activity is indeed different than advancement. Activity just means being a TD at some event/tournament. This requirement is just so you don’t get dropped off the TD list for being inactive.
The activity requirement is minimal, and it does NOTHING towards making sure TDs stay current on the rules.
I suspect if we took the active NTDs, had them take the senior exam CLOSED BOOK, fewer than half would get a score of 50%, which, BTW, is not a passing grade.
Most licensed professionals (doctors, accountants, lawyers, massage therapists, etc) have continuing education requirements to retain their professional certification. US Chess does not.
Add this to my list of windmills regarding TD certification and training. :sigh:
I would say that I have read through the rule book 3 times and still don’t know word for word the rules. I am ready for the next edition to be printed.
I don’t think you need to be able to recite them from memory, I do think you should know how to apply many rules without having to look them up, especially the ones that come up frequently, like allocating prize funds. Understanding is not the same as rote memorization.
Many TDs found local more experienced TDs that would take them on as assistants and help them through the real-world experiences. I had one back in the mid 80’s and another once I started going to national events on a regular basis.
There’s probably no direct substitute for that kind of hands-on training, but I think a series of quiz questions, with annotated answers, would help teach the fundamentals.
But it requires a lot of work to create and annotate quiz questions, starting with ‘what is the learning goal of this question?’ And that’s not at all the same thing as a new TD posing a question that is not based on a real-world situation and asking if the answer is right.
US Chess currently does no formalized TD training, the closest they come are the TD workshops at the US Open. (Passing an exam does not count as training.) FIDE at least has Arbiter seminars that go through the rules and prepare the students for the FIDE exam, and one must now take the seminar before taking the test to become a FA. (I’m probably glossing over the specifics, because I haven’t really looked at them lately.)
Chris Bird’s TD Show series has shows that each have more focus on a closely related subset of TD issues. Test prep is just a minor side effect of focusing on actual TD issues.
Hardly anybody passes the Senior TD exam when it is taken closed book, but a good part of the reason for that is that pairing programs have become so prevalent that many (most?) TDs under 65 years old and at any certification level would have difficultly pairing manually. Another big issue is that TDs take the exam closed book because they do not have enough experience credits to take it open book - and that lack of experience makes it difficult for them.
For clarification, with the exception of Club TDs, 80% is a passing grade. With the mentioned use of pairing programs in the past few decades many TDs of any level would have difficulty making it through the pairing questions closed book, but that is not an issue for actual tournaments except for those few players are want to know exactly why the pairings came out the way they did (and when I show them exactly why the pairings came out that way and which rules governed I will often get the answer “that’s not how it should be, the rules need to be changed, and you need to pair this round the way it should be paired”). As far as non-pairing questions go I have a much higher confidence than Nolan does for experienced and active TDs (senior level and higher) to do well on the questions. And one reason even NTDs bring the rulebook to tournaments is to be able to doublecheck things for uncommon issues.
I don’t pretend to have every single rule memorized but I know where to look in uncommon situations to verify that what I think is correct is actually correct (it almost always is but the few times it was not it was good that I doublechecked).
I would disagree with this. The idea is that if TDs are staying active, then theoretically they are staying up to date with any rules changes because if they needed to make a ruling on something that changed recently, they should be able to get the ruling correct.
However, in terms of NTDs there is no activity requirement for you to keep your NTD title. Currently that one is for life, regardless of how active/inactive you are. Even as an NTD myself, I don’t agree with that.
Is there such a valid time control as 30/45? In this case what would be the time deduction penalty for a player who doesn’t know how to keep score? The rule to deduct 5% of time or 10 minutes whichever is less from the player’s time clock? So what should be the computed time deduction for the player?
The rules show this, specifically the examples from 15a1 (TD Tip). The question is, though, do you mean “30 moves made in 45 minutes”, or something like “30 minutes with a 45 second increment or delay”?
I passed the senior test closed book, in 1987. I wonder how many people have even taken it closed book in the last 20 years? First, people have to know the option exists, then they have to have a way to have the exam administered. I took mine at the US Open in Portland OR, Ira Lee Riddle was the chief TD of that event and proctored the exam for me.