So…I wanted to play in the online Quick tournament today at chess.com to benefit US Chess, but was not sure real-life obligations would allow, thus did not pre-register.
This morning, it turns out I am able to play. So I traveled via cyber express to the registration page, only to find that registration closed last night.
Not sure I understand. What is it about an online event that requires 15 hours after end of registration prior to the start of round one? If this will be the norm, it’s a problem that will reduce entries for online tournaments, I think.
It is common for players to wait till Saturday morning to decide whether to enter weekend events. Or as in my case, find out whether they are able to play.
Interested to hear thoughts on this from folks who have organized or directed rated online events, or who plan to do so.
Online events have one step during registration that OTB events don’t have, they have to tie someone’s online handle to their US Chess member ID, which means validating that ID as belonging to the same individual as that online handle.
The extra time may be, in part, to deal with that validation process.
Moving away from the outdated PIN system has changed this task, though there’s an online interface being developed for it. (Chess.com chose not to use the online interface that was developed for the PIN system, I don’t think they’ll be given an option not to use the new one.)
Perhaps it would help if Chess.com (and other online providers) could allow “pre-pre-registration”. It would serve the purpose of getting the validation machinery in motion, i.e. to connect a player’s handle with his U.S. Chess ID record. The deadline for pre-pre-registration could still be 24 hours or so before the start of the tournament. Once that’s done, a player could then still wait until the morning of the tournament to actually decide whether to play. And if he decides not to, then he can just not pre-register, but his pre-pre-registration would be done in case he wants to play in a different tournament later.
That would require a split pre-registration (with people that have not done the pre-pre-registration complaining about not getting in while others could. Such complaints could be answered by explanation of the pre-pre-registration while people’s eyes glaze over.
Also there is assignment setup to be done (allocating boards to TDs) and other back room processes to be prepared. Large on-line tournaments with the potential for large numbers of last minute entries are still fairly new, so I wouldn’t expect pre-pre-registration to be usable until a lot more experience is gained. That doesn’t even take into account that the website staff may have multiple organizers to support and might not have the staff to simultaneously support last minute requirements from multiple large tournaments.
Keep in mind that CCA now manually looks up each player’s Online Regular rating and, if necessary, bumps the player up into a higher section. They use the higher of the OTB Regular and Online Regular ratings.
On both Chess.com and ICC/CCA, the players are manually added to clubs or groups prior to the tournament. While these steps take perhaps a minute per player (less?), the TD cannot process a large number of last minute entries alongside other organizational duties.
That’s why CCA staff would dearly love to have OTB regular and online regular in a single database, so that their registration software could automate that process.
I don’t see the point of this, other than to identify each entrant’s U.S. Chess data (name, state, rating) with their ICC or Chess.com handle, if any.
I would think that, if ICC keeps records of all U.S. Chess vs ICC handle matchups it can find, it might be able to handle a larger number of late entrants, so that there can be a later registration deadline for those players who have already been matched than for those who have not.
Players not yet matched could be required to register 24 hours in advance, or at least to (somehow) establish their matchups by that time. Players who have already established their matchups (either by specifically doing so 24 hours before, or by having played in previous tournaments) could have a shorter deadline.
And the FIDE ratings conversion. And conversion from other foreign ratings. And checking the CCA minimum ratings list. At least it isn’t the National Scholastics where the NWSRS, KCA and CXR ratings would also have to be checked.
There are various reasons for such segregation. The first that comes to mind is being able to send each group a link to its own Zoom room so that all of the players in a group can be monitored together. Some tournaments will have sections small enough for one TD to handle multiple sections while others will need a single section to be split between two TDs.
Handling a large number of late entrants at OTB tournaments is notorious for tournaments starting 15, 30 or 45 minutes late even without the additional setup needed for an on-line event and there seems to be less forgiveness for a late on-line start.
In the late '80s and early '90s Illinois had on-site registration for scholastic tournaments. When they were changed to advance entry only a number of people were perturbed but the overwhelming majority appreciated tournaments starting earlier. A question is whether the late-start annoyance to most of the players is worth the convenience of a few, and I’ve seen a lot of players, parents and coaches be quite willing to put up with inconveniences in exchange for a tournament starting on time and running on schedule.
If you look at F-pawn’s 1 minute per player and 300 players then 24 hours in advance allows a person to spend five hours the day before and still have time to get sleep before the start of the event. If you reduce that to 12 hours then the tendency of people to procrastinate would likely mean that at least half would wait until the last minute and now you have people under pressure and working past midnight just doing registration duties before getting up early and exhausted to take care of the final setup in the morning before spending the day on the event.
Well, that works for players who have a PIN, but US Chess stopped issuing PINs on July 6th. There’s a new procedure in development that won’t rely on ‘secret’ information like a PIN or password.
Maybe not, but it sure would be convenient, not only for CCA but for anybody else planning to run online regular-rated events using the various tournament registration programs.
That is only a partial explanation. The ICC and Chess.com pairings software requires all participants to be members of the same group or club. For example, certain US Chess affiliates have two clubs on Chess.com, one for casual tournaments and a second for US Chess online rated play.
I asked Boyd Reed on Aug 12 if US Chess could make a database of Online Regular ratings available to affiliates. Boyd replied that he had forwarded my email to Carol Meyer.
Regarding the registration cutoff, we had a lot of issues with ICC user names and pin numbers, and the situation was made worse by the USCF web reprogramming, after which affiliates could no longer directly submit memberships and processing them manually by the office was done at most only once a day. Some players were unable to play because even though they had paid dues, the server rejected them as being nonmembers. During this period, we had trouble getting the first round started even with the advance entry deadline being about 16 hours before.
Things have improved recently, but we still had the problem that no matter what the deadline, some players would ask that it be waived for them. We would tell them that would be unfair to others we had already turned away, and they would demand that we make an exception for them and tell nobody about it, saying that taking just one more entry couldn’t be that difficult. One player kept doing this in tournament after tournament, always late for the deadline, and then sending repeated emails begging that we make an exception for him.
To avoid players pleading for exceptions, we now have a new policy for the slower events. Entries are accepted past the tournament starting time, until about an hour before round 2, but the deadline for playing round 1 is still many hours in advance. Those who enter after that deadline must take a half point bye in round 1. This has been working well, as we never get so many late entries with byes as to be inconvenient.