Fortunately, after reading through the rule book for the 2nd time, I came to realize I may have to pay prize money out of my own pocket if I put “Guaranteed” on the money winnings in TLA and only half the players showed up that needed to show up. Thus, saving me trouble by not putting in the TLA, Guaranteed $70 Prize Fund based on 8 players: $35 for 1st; $20 for 2nd; $15 for 3rd.
*Secondly, wouldn’t it be better to have 4 rounds instead of 3 rounds in a Swiss SD/30, d/5 tournament in order to avoid a problem of having too many place ties for 1st, 2nd, and 3rd? We are looking for 8 players minimum. If we get 12, we could add a quad tournament. However, I have not thought about what the quad payout would be and what places to pay out for on the quad. The entry fee is $15. The total tournament expenses are $10 + 5 x Number of Players.
You could consider a partial guarantee, say, first place only, or even guaranteeing just 75% of first place. Give the top players a financial incentive if you want to get/keep them coming to your events, although at my events it seemed to be the B/C players who made the difference between losing money, breaking even or showing a modest profit.
Many players read ‘not-guaranteed’ or ‘based on’ as ‘cut all the prizes in half’.
Although most organizers cannot afford to lose money at every event, if you’re just getting started you do need to build up some credibility for running a quality event. That also means starting rounds on time, having a site that isn’t a dump, etc.
US Chess and TDCC tend to interpret the pre-tournament prize fund information strictly.
Well, I don’t know how things are supposed to work, but the club isn’t making hardly any profit. We are only getting $10 to pay the reporting fee out of and keep the rest.
I sympathize, a new club needs to do what it can afford. But if turnout is better than expected, increasing the prize fund a bit will help to build your reputation. And if you can build up a group of regulars at your events, it makes planning future ones a lot easier.
You may not think of it this way, but you’re marketing your club and its events and (probably) yourself as organizer/TD, and marketing is never easy.
It is possible to raise money for tournaments, but if you think marketing is hard work, try fund-raising. I know some people who were very good at it, got well paid for it, and burned out after a few years and had to do something else.
There are two types of donors, those who just want to see your organization/project (in this case chess) succeed and those who see it as a form of community support/advertising. With both you have to be able to tell the donor what the donation will be used for and with the latter also what promotional value, if any, they get for their money. A happy donor is one who stays a donor.
Based-on prizes only guarantee at least half if the total prize fund is $500 or more. Otherwise only the turnout percentage is guaranteed. See rule 32C4. $600 based on 100 players has $300 paid out if only 20 show up. $400 based on 100 players has $80 paid out if only 20 show up.
It might be a regional thing but if more than the based on show up then organizers sometimes or usually increase the prize fund ($2000 based on 100 can be increased to $2800 if 140 show up). There is no requirement to do such an increase but intangible good will may be earned if you do so.
There are expected size limitations based on tournament director certification level. Club level TDs are permitted to be the chief TD of tournaments up to 50 players in size (60 with a pairing computer program and an assistant that is also a TD). Based on prizes are supposed to be based on a reasonable expectation of getting at least half of the based on, so a club TD is a plausible chief TD of a tournament with a 100-player based on (automatically at least 50 are expected). A club TD cannot be a plausible planned chief TD of a 200-player based on (at least 100 expected). Under the current system it might only come to light if there are complaints filed about the tournament, but in those cases the penalties the organizer and/or TD faces may often be more severe due to a premeditated disregarding of those limits. I am wondering if the new system will automatically flag (for office follow-up review) overly large tournaments based on the chief TD’s level.
There might be a case for exceeding the limits, but only in unforeseen circumstances. As a Local TD (allowing up to 120 players) I ended up as chief of a 540 player scholastic (450% of the maximum) when the planned NTD chief TD was hospitalized by a car accident the day before the event and there was nobody else available in that short time frame. I made it through (with difficulty due to some significant site issues) by having a good staff to support the event. It did bring home to me why there are size limits for the certification levels. Another unforeseen circumstance is a tournament that traditionally draws 80-90 players with a Local TD chief having one year with a surprisingly high 220 players showing up and still with a Local TD chief. It might be nice to have a text box for explanations when a too-large event is run by a chief TD not certified for that size.
I wonder if 2 club TDs would be allowed to have a Rated tournament for 69 school children. If not 2, what about 3 club TDs. Couldn’t we claim having 34 1/2 or 23 students respectively? We could ask for special permission. The rule book mentions having 2 lead TDs in a certain situation for a tournament.
Co-chiefs are for unusual circumstances (maybe only one is available on Saturday and the other only on Sunday for the two-day event). Co-chiefs should be an appropriate level as if they were sole chief. Note that co-chief is not a current option in the tournament report and I do not think it was put into the new version.
If a school had two entirely different tournaments with entirely different staffs then they can be separate events. I once soloed a fixed board team event in the library of a school while a different tournament was being held in the gym and there was zero overlap in staffs. The All Girls National in Columbus was held the same weekend in the same hotel as the National High School, one floor apart with nobody from the National High School working the All Girls and nobody from the All Girls working the National High School. If you do not have separation of staff then it is not really different events.
Jeff Wiewel 2024-2025 Tournament Director Certification Committee Chair
So then, all we would need is a Local Level TD for 69 Swiss tournament players? And if 2 Assistant Club TDs were added, that is fine? It would be nice to have 6-8 more volunteers, but each one would have to be Safe Play certified.
You may be able to recruit volunteers who don’t work on tasks requiring TD certification, such as handling setup and teardown, the advance and onsite registration process, prepping for rounds, posting pairings and results, etc. With kids, just having an adult in the playing room at all times can help maintain order.
Having a few extra hands can take a lot of the workload off of the TD(s).
And you may be able to get enough experience to take the local exam before schools reopen. Are there other tournaments in the area you could volunteer to serve as an assistant at, to gain real-world experience as well as experience credits?
One word of caution about using volunteers at your events (courtesy of the TDCC chair)
You need to make sure that doesn’t create more problems than it solves. At national events, US Chess tries to make sure all volunteers have had some basic training on SafeSport issues, for example.
Right Nolan, I am aware of that requirement about Safe Play certification for volunteers. I just went through an unrated tournament with 69 children. I was involved with the computer pairings. I had to come up with a manual pairing or two. I used ChessNut. That was my first ever tournament. I hope to have a rated tournament in September, but 16 players is the all the head TD wants to show up if not just 12. I plan to use ChessNut again for the pairings. As far as helping with other tournaments in the area, that is a good idea to look around my nearby towns for.
Someone else in another post somewhere was wondering what category a quad tournament would fall in. Did you answer that question in the other post? As far as I know we should just report it as a dual rated tournament regardless of the Category R status. It would be a SD/30, d/5 for instance.
The only references to dual rated events I can find in the current TDCC certification document are ones that say a dual-rated event is counted as a regular-rated event, not a quick-rated event.
But I will fully admit to not being very up-to-date on the specifics of TD credits needed to advance to a higher certification level.
However, the document does say that an R event must have at least six players in it, so quads would not qualify there, no matter what the time control is.
I think there was a question recently as to whether two quads counts as an 8 player RR. I believe the answer to that was no. However, I believe 4 quad sections would be counted as a 16 player event, but only a category D event, since it did not use Swiss pairings.
A tournament with quads counts as a (single) tournament when factoring in automatic renewal based on activity. Otherwise it does not count in any of the Swiss tournament types (A, B, C, D, T) or 6+ player round robing (R - regardless of how many quads there are). If there are a number of players not divisible by four then the bottom three round Swiss section of 5 or more players could count as a category D section (C and higher requires four or more rounds).
What about a Quad where the players play their opponents one game with White and another game with Black. That would be 12 games all together. So, would that be 4 rounds resulting in a Double Quad? Would that be enough rounds and games to qualify as a Category R tournament or is it still Category D tournament?
Category R requires at least six players. It also requires an average rating of at least 1400. A Quad is not a Swiss so does not qualify for any of the Swiss categories, not even category D. The categories are only to identify tournaments that can be used for certification advancement and not every tournament type fits in that. A single team versus team match does not fit (a Swiss team vs team tournament is different and can even count for category T if there are enough players). A quad does not fit. A tournament that only runs two rounds does not fit (one example is my club’s 2020 club championship with one round per week that was stopped after two rounds due to the Covid lockdown). An extra games section that is made up of players with byes playing anybody just standing around does not fit (it was paired as a Swiss) and thus an extra games section cannot be used to lift the tournament size up to 50 or 100.
I would once again like to urge you to correct the rulebook then, which specifically states that a quad is a round robin.
The Round Robin Tournament
30A. Description.
This tournament format is also known as all-play-all. Formerly the almost-exclusive format for chess competitions, the round robin is most often used now for important events where time is not a factor, club events with one game per week, and one-day four-player events known as quads.