Travel Friendly/Unfriendly Tournaments

All Things Chess
1

It is nice when a chess tournament is in your home town, but in most cases it is necessary to travel to play in a tournament. Many people will have to drive 1 hour or more in order to play in a weekend chess tournament. Then there are those players that fly into a town and/or state in order to play in some weekend tournament. Now there is of course the need for decent time controls, or desireable time controls in order to draw in the players for the tournament. This can cause restrictions to the round times that get used, as well as restrictions of the site itself.

Yet, how many tournaments try to make themselves travel friendly? I remember that in 2000 for the US Open in Minneapolis/St. Paul that it was hard to find a flight out Sunday night after 10pm. This was for a flight to Chicago [O’Hare international airport], as I had decided against the 6 hour drive option and did not want to take an extra day off of work. It is possible that this is the reason that the HB Global tournament use the 30/90, SD/60 time control. I think this is interesting and important, as you can not always get a half point bye for the final round of a tournament. Also, most players would prefer to play the final round rather than take a bye. Think about it, if the last round Sunday is at 4pm or later with a time control of 40/2, SD/1 you could play past 10pm.

Can I get some opinions on time controls and more importantly round times for tournaments?

Larry S. Cohen
Senior Tournament Director
and occasion tournament organizer

2

The following is, of course, IMHO. YMMV, etc. I also acknowledge that some of my comments may be aimed at general types of events that the OP didn’t intend to address.

Smaller local events are really designed to be convenient for local players. This makes good business sense, as the overwhelming percentage of regular participants will be locally based. In that case, about all the local organizer can do is try to place the tournament as close to major roads as possible, which should limit the odds of out-of-area players getting lost. (In fact, I am playing at such an event right now. :slight_smile: )

For weekend Swisses, travel-friendly can have many facets. Generally, I would think the primary factors are location, round times and amenities (not necessarily in that order). As the OP asked about round times and time controls, I will stick to that.

To a good extent, weekend Swiss organizers still need to give the local market what it prefers WRT time controls. However, I find that many players like to leave as early as possible on the last day of a weekender. So, it is not unusual to start that day’s play earlier.

As for length of game, it may be that increment time controls may be friendlier to travelers than delay time controls. Take the case of G/120, d/5 versus G90+30i. If the game is not over 60 moves long, the increment control will likely produce a significantly faster result. In the case of a five-round weekender, you could schedule the Sunday rounds for 9am and 3pm, and still likely get most games done before 7, while giving lots of time after the 9am rounds for players to pack their cars (if needed), eat and recharge. Of course, if the local players strongly prefer longer time controls, and you are a local organizer, this is harder to implement (but still doable).

As for general recommendations, I believe that the most travel-friendly time controls are those with a base time of 4 hours or less. Greg Shahade has recommended going to G90+30i for top sections of major US Swisses, which would certainly be travel-friendly. I would not be averse to trying it for all sections, not just the top ones, though players at the biggest events might blanch at first.

The one thing some US events do on the last day is shorten the time between rounds, if there is more than 1 round on the last day. I don’t like this, though I acknowledge its benefits for traveling players. I think it is a little harder on players (who would like more time between games) and directors (who could use more time between the last two rounds, especially to review pairings, handle dropouts, and reset the playing hall).

3

The OP made the same arguments for why 4-hour games (30/90, SD 30) and 5-hour games (30/90, SD 60) are very popular in Northern California. Almost no matter where you place a tournament, at least half of the likely attendees need to travel more than 30 minutes, each way.

Of course, there always are a few people who grumble that 30/90 is too fast. Given that local adult chess is overrun by juniors, these older guys are a definite minority.

The two annual events with 40/2, SD/1 draw well enough, but I know some people who don’t attend because the evening rounds go too late. Some of the best hotels are suburban locations with excellent freeway access, but are further away from where people live.

Michael Aigner

4

. .
A fundamental problem with the commonly used long time controls is that neither play can possibly have any idea, before the game starts, of how many move-pairs will be needed to complete the game.
This creates guesswork (and thus luck too) about how to allocate one’s allotted time (about how aggressively to spend more time or to conserve time for later in the perhaps game).

Compare these two time controls:
(A) 40/120, SD/60, i5
…to…
(B) 20/60, 20/60, SD/60, i5

Perhaps “(B)” would result in an overall shorter mean time duration per game?:
If the player is in trouble at move-pair 18, he might not be able to take an unnecessarily exhorbitant amount of thinking time just to indulge his natural emotional avoidance of progressing the game that is deteriorating against him.

BTWay, what does the intialism “OP” stand for?
. .

5

Original Poster

Alex Relyea

6

Actually my point as a player is that I have flown into tournaments out of state. This has been a problem was the lateness of the last round. I have either had to take a last round bye [I would rather play], spend an extra day for a flight out the next day, or worse take a ‘redeye’ flight. Most of the 2-day tournaments appear to have the long time controls [40/2, SD/1] with a start time of 4:15 or later.

As an organizer I would like to know what players want in terms of time controls and round times. One year I ran a tournament over the 4th of July weekend. The 4th was a Monday, and my tournament was Sat/Sun only. 1st round was Saturday at 1pm, and the final round Sunday was at 3pm. What was really amazing was that one player drove from West Virginia to Chicago for the event, and drove back becasue he said he had to work on Monday!

On anther note I do wonder why some tournaments wait until the 3rd round to merge schedules. If you have Round 2 at 1pm, and the 2-day time control is G/90 or faster with Rd 1 at 9am for the 2-day, then why not merge at round 2??

Larry S. Cohen

7

I’m not sure how you can reasonably schedule a tournament around airline arrival and departure times without anticipating where every single out-of-town player will be flying to and from, and on what airline. Maybe if your area is served only by a commuter airport with only one airline flying to only one hub, it’s easy enough to figure out, but in any medium-size or large city, there are too many possibilities to account for.

Now, on another level . . . suppose your tournament location is close to a bus stop or a commuter rail station, and the buses or trains are infrequent (i.e., an hour or more between runs). If the bus or train stops near you at 10:10 AM, and you insist on starting all your tournaments at 10 rather than 10:30, that’s just plain spiteful.

8

I’m not sure. If you start at 10:30am you run the risk of having lots of people show up just 10 minutes or so before the first round is scheduled to begin. Starting at 10am might encourage people to arrive on the 9:10am bus so they have time to register and settle in. (I’m assuming, of course, that the bus runs hourly. If not, well, you get the idea, I hope!)

9

Real chessplayers will do what it takes to get there, play their games, and get home.

10

Well, yeah. The ideal is that your players arrive between 20 minutes and one hour in advance of your start time. The assumption of my example was that the 10:10 bus/train was the only one on which players might arrive. I was trying to keep it simple. (In reality, depending on where you are and where your players come from, you might want to know the times of buses or trains traveling in both directions.)

11

This depends on the scope and target population of your tournament. Most tournaments are local and don’t expect to draw many players from a distance two hours or more away. Regional or Grand Prix events show greater ambition and expect more players from outside the area. One would expect certain accomodations, but there are limits one can achieve to suit everyone’s interests. A national tournament with multiple schedules provide greater flexibility, but once again there are limits to what you can do.

On the local level, one day events that are not scholastic can optimally be expected to have four rounds. Normal is to have rounds at 10 am - 1 pm - 4 pm -7 pm. This schedule fits well for locals. Lot of chess for the buck. Time controls can range from game 60 to game 75 with enough time between rounds for refreshment, doing pairings. You can condense this format for events for faster time controls, but you get the picture. This type of event is really local in nature. Anyone coming in would have to deal with any inconveniences on their own and should not expect any special consideration.

Two day events on the local level, regional, or Grand Prix level usually are of the 4 round or 5 round variety. Three rounds in one day, and two the next are typical and grueling to compete in. Two games a day is ideal for many people. Rounds at 10 am and 4 pm are fine. But it depends on the time control you want to run. 40/120, Game 60, d5 or 30/90, Game 60 d5 fit well in the two day, four round format. If you think that is too long, or you want to have 5 rounds, then Game 90, d5 or Game 90, 30i is plenty of time. I would run rounds at 10 am - 2 pm - 6 pm on Saturday; 10 am - 2 pm on Sunday for a 5 round, two day tournament. The rounds are consistent. There is no need to adapt to the switch from a faster to a slower time control as usually happens in most two+ day events. Everyone has equal conditions. You can have more than one section based on rating or class.

Your biggest concern seems to be when to have the last round start so that out of town players can go home at a reasonable time. I can say this from experience that I don’t really care about the last round start time. My pet peeve is moving up the starting time to 9 am just so the last round is over early. Sounds great for the organizer, but that lack of sleep is killing for the players. The worst tournament I played in was one that occurred over a weekend where the clocks changed for Daylight Savings. You were losing an hour to begin with and the organizer started the games at 9 am, which BTW was less than 8 hours from the time the 3rd round’s games finished. What a nightmare for us all.

12

I hate it when the tournament organizers don’t have the special hotel rate for the evening of the last round, in case I want to travel home, at my leisure, in the morning.

13

This issue is actually a fairly consistent problem at scholastic nationals, which are typically in 2nd and 3rd tier cities, often with less access to airports and or flights.

14

The April 26-28, 2013 “20th Space Coast Open Chess Festival” not only offers GMs and IMs free entry online until March 31st, but also the block room rates (which includes suites) at the Doubletree by Hilton Cocoa Beach Oceanfront are available three days before and after the tournament. The top section will be FIDE rated.
sco2013.eventbrite.com/

Kennedy Space Center is about a 40-minute drive from the site.