How far in advance do you put out publicity for a one-day tournament? This is a mostly local, low-entry fee tournament, but we hope to get a few players from out of town. Is earlier publicity always better?
Publicity will include posting on USChess site, on Texaschess.org calendar, and email to local players and to fairly-near TDs who are willing to send it out to their list.
I am avoiding dates close to a major event in our state (Southwest Open, over Labor Day weekend).
You might want to visit other tournaments in your area that come before yours. (Maybe even play in them, or help them direct if they need help.) The organizers of those might let you put out a stack of flyers near the pairing sheets or water tables or wherever they leave blank score sheets for the players to record their moves.
Bill Smythe
It really depends on who you’re trying to reach. I held several successful tournaments with less than two weeks notice attracting 30 or more players just by phone a half dozen local players and asking them to call another half dozen, etc. There used to be an organizer in western Iowa who ran tournaments at his place but couldn’t predict very far in advance when he’d be available because he was in an agricultural business and his crops didn’t always come in on a precise schedule. (He grew mushrooms.) So he’d make a few phone calls mid-week and get a dozen or more players on Saturday.
As other OTB tournaments ramp up, the possibility of distributing flyers at those tournaments becomes an option again. Mailing postcards is expensive, email is cheaper, but both will miss many potential players (perhaps as much as 40% of them) because they have opted out of mail or email contact. Web notices are probably better now than they were before the pandemic, because we’ve all become much more acclimated to the web.