The new Leago System requires a override from the National Office if the event is submitted over 10 days from the end date.
That’s gotta change, too many events (about 8%) come in 7-27 days after the event ends. But 1 week is what the rule book suggests for ‘timely’ submission. Sanctioning a TD for tardy submission is rare, another rule with essentially no enforcement clause.
2 days to submit a tournament for validation is reasonable as a general rule for small size tournaments if a computer program was used to run the tournament. However, what about when a large tournament is run manually? Do TDs even do that now? A large computer tournament may be submitable for validation in 2 days, but even without errors, alerts and warnings can come up hindering validation during a Saturday or Sunday. It may take communication with the USCF before successful validation. 2 days to submit for validation is reasonable but not for validation itself. It takes time to deal with alerts and warnings if the USCF office has to help out.
In a 17 player tournament it took 2 days for us to validate after submitting on a Saturday because of having to communicate with the USCF office on Monday. Requiring 7 days for over the board tournaments and 3 weeks for online tournaments is fair. And using computer software really speeds up compliance.
There is one TD who I have been told still uses pairing cards. Quads and other RRs are easy to run without pairing software, of course, and other non-Swiss events like ladders and scrambles.
Would you elaborate on what the $10 fee is for exactly? What is it supposed to do? Chessnut does help out with seeing who is current and who isn’t.
The $10 fee was a Delegate idea, suggested by Allen Priest before his term as President, as I recall, that we needed a way for TDs to deal with players for whom they don’t discover until after the event is over and the players have left that a player is not a current member. Sometimes there’s no easy or fast way to contact those members. That’s why it has been called a ‘correction fee’ rather than ‘dues’.
It was not intended to absolve TDs from their responsibility to check on the membership status of all their players, which these days is a lot easier than it was when I started directing in the 1980’s. You can even do it by cell phone now. (Having an app will make that even easier, I hope that project is making good progress.)
It also wasn’t intended as a ‘cheaper’ membership option for adult players, for whom there is a $20 two-month membership option. We used to be able to process the $20 short-term memberships as part of the tournament submission process, but lost that capability when the membership system was switched to CIVI-CRM in July of 2020.
We do track the $10 fees for abuses, I haven’t really seen any serious abuses. (Tracking their usage is something Leago will need to set up at some point.)
When I first started doing data analysis for US Chess, in 1998, one of the first thing I noticed was that we had a block of members that I would call ‘leap-froggers’. They play in just one tournament a year, often over Labor Day, which is when a lot of states hold their state championships. So they’d join at the tournament, eg, in September, and that membership ran through the end of September a year later, since memberships generally ended on the last day of the month in which they were purchased. They didn’t need to pay dues next September, so they only paid dues every other year.
I”m not 100% sure that is still the case, I think memberships processed early in September (for example), may only go through August 31st.
One of the updates that Leago is hoping to get working this week is polling CIVI-CRM in real-time for membership status if their local copy of the membership data doesn’t contain a member ID or says it isn’t current. (We don’t really want to be doing that for 100% of players in an event, because it would slow validation down and the Leago system needs a local database of members for MSA-like functions anyway.)
Some nights a player can’t even sign up due to US Chess website issues.
I am submitting a scholastic tournament, and got the following error:
**Warning section 2 Pairing # 20 ID 32599735 possible ID or birthdate
issue: player under 4 years old
Other than contacting the player’s parents and see if they are willing to contact US Chess and see what the birthday issue is, what else could I do? Thank you.
How much time do I have before the report becomes tardy? Is there a way to submit the other sections first? There were no inter-section extra rated games.
We show the player with a 2022 birthdate, which would make him 3.
Contact ratingsmgr@uschess.org or membership@uschess.org.
The player is in the grade 2-4 section. So could be anything from 2018 to 2015.
I got hold of the player’s parent and the parent updated the birthdate.
But I re-validate the event, I am still seeing the same warning “player under 4 years old”…
I don’t see an updated birthdate in member records yet, send it to me in email if you have it: mnolan@uschess.org