For anyone who has run a medium to large scholastic tournament where the rounds do not have scheduled times but are started as fast as possible, a major problem is notifying everyone when the pairings are ready. Usually there is a large crowd sitting around in a cafeteria and someone may not hear when you make the announcement or they could be somewhere else. At the MD States last year I had a couple of people miss rounds or arrive late due to this problem.
To address this problem, I tried a new method at our January tournament. This tournament had 240 people and we had five sections all running without scheduled round start times. I used an online service to send out batch text messages when the pairings were posted. It took about 30 seconds to compose the message through a web interface and the message arrived about 30 seconds after I sent it. I had around 75 phones signed up and you could see the people who had signed up starting to head out as I was starting to make the announcement. The feedback I got was uniformly positive.
We’re going to be using this at the Maryland State Scholastic Championships in March. One change I’ve made is that you can now sign up for messages for each section individually. This will reduce the messages that are sent to people about sections they don’t care about and reduce the total number of messages that I send. This should help with getting rounds started faster and allow people to not worry about missing an announcement.
The online service is eztexting.com. The cost is $0.05 per message for the express messages. The cost is 1/2 that for messages sent via the internet but in my testing these can be quite slow and may not arrive at all.
I just wanted to let others know about this since I think it can really help.
Mike Regan
Was the last sentence of your text message:
Turn this thing off before you enter the playing hall!
Mike,
Well, since almost all of the phones were parent phones instead of player phones, this was not a problem. You do have a good point, though.
Mike
That raises an interesting question.
Suppose a spectator’s cell phone (or similar device) goes off while he or she is in the playing hall.
What steps can/should the TDs take?
Turn back their cell phone clock by ten minutes?
– Hal Terrie
Well, at least you didn’t say ‘double forfeit the game they’re watching’. 
In this area the one-day local scholastics predominantly use an as-available schedule. Most are in schools with P.A. systems (some of which can make announcements excluding the playing room), so the announcements are generally not a problem. With team rooms available, finding the stragglers is also possible. The parents and coaches are heavily in favor of an as-available schedule for these (so a five-round G/30 primary section can start at 9 AM and sometimes finish its awards ceremony by 1:30 PM).
For a state championship I am strongly in favor of a fixed schedule, and the parents and coaches on average come down a little in favor of that as well. I think the state (700+ players for K-8) should have a different feel to it than a local tournament (maybe as many as 400+ players for K-8). One of the reasons I’ve used is that the state tournaments are too large to be held in the schools that local tournaments use, so a P.A. is not always available. Personally, I feel that at a tournament the size of state that there will generally being at least one game using most of the time control, minimizing the time savings compared to what you see at a local tournament.
I tell the parents I will ask them to leave and not allow them back. I also tell them at the astart that if it is a big problem then I will simply close the floor entirely. I usually don’t do that the first time and I rarely have a 2nd problem. If someone decides to have a conversation one request for them to leave usually gets compliance.
At the Liberty Bell Open, the TDs were banning spectators from coming back into the room if their phone rang. I’m not sure how easy it was to enforce.