In the USCF announcement entitled “USCF Promotes National Chess Day, October 9” (dated June 17, 2010), they state: “Any Rated Beginner Open that includes “National Chess Day” in it’s TLA title gets both a free TLA and free rating fees.”
What is (or qualifies as) a “Rated Beginner Open”?
Steven Craig Miller
Any rated tournament restricted to players without USCF ratings or with ratings under 1200. The idea is to help them build up a stable rating by providing a field in which they have a decent chance to win at least one game.
See the Activity Means Members box, which is on page 57 of the June 2010 issue.
Affiliates may run one free TLA (up to 8 lines) each month providing it meets one of the special categories listed. One of them is:
RBO: Open to Under 1200/Unrated or Under 1000/unrated. Tournament name must include "Rated Beginners Open"or “RBO”.
Do RBOs require memberships? Is the only unique benefit a free TLA?
RBOs are not exempt from the membership requirement.
What you perceive as a relatively small value to holding an RBO may help explain why there aren’t very many of them held.
Maybe there aren’t many RBOs because there aren’t enough tournament organizers who are low-rated enough to have had the experience of playing in one. When you’ve gotten clubbed over the head by the Bye Fairy enough times in open events, or when you’ve just gotten tired of having to celebrate a 1.0/4 finish as a moral victory, an RBO is a welcome relief.
I’ve been fortunate enough, since moving from Massachusetts to Illinois, to have played in both vanilla RBOs (not all of them going by that title – at the Evanston Chess Club, for instance, I played in an “U1200 tournament,” the exact same thing in all but name) and in U1200 and U1000 sections of open events, a significantly different experience from being a noob paired against an expert or master in one’s first round of a wide-open open. It impressed upon me the importance of holding such events in areas where the majority of players are enthusiastic but low-skill. My club (which just turned one year old this past month) held its first RBO in July, back to back with an open Swiss, and we’re repeating the combination in October, using National Chess Day as a springboard to get more players into it.