I actually didn’t realize that JTP still existed in any form. I will talk to Albert about it for the next tournament. I see no reason not to use it.
They guess and ask the parents/coaches where they think their child belongs. Sometimes they get it wrong. For instance they put Jonathan Shih (who had played in tournaments before and done OK) in the 6-8 reserve section in 2004 and he went 5-0. For the most part guessing has worked out OK.
Now that I know JTP still exists I just wish it could be expanded to include more grades.
Here’s a Mike Nolan question: If the USCF had no membership fees, what would the rating fee per game have to be to make up the difference? Assuming of course the number of games doesn’t change. (Personally I think the number of games would go up. This also ignores the potential impact on Chess Life.)
Any affiliate can run a PRIMARY event (nobody higher than 3rd grade).
I think the only restrictions are that the event cannot be a national event or one that awards a state championship.
A scholastic affiliate (one that begins with the letter ‘H’) can hold an in-school tournament for the students (K-12) of that school.
As to the dues question, that’s both an easy and a hard question to answer.
First the easy answer:
The USCF collects dues of about $1.8 million a year. The USCF rates about 600,000 games a year. Thus to completely replace the dues, without changing anything else, the USCF would have to increase ratings fees by $3.00 per game.
Now the hard answer:
What would a no-dues USCF look like, what services would it offer, and to whom? Would there be a print magazine, an online webzine, would we be able to field teams for FIDE events such as the Olympiad?
Unless we know what the non-ratings activities of a restructured USCF are, it’s not possible to come up with the amount of additional revenue that would be needed from ratings fees. I think fees might still need to be increased by $1 per game, if not more than that, depending upon what things the USCF does now that it would no longer do. (It’s hard to imagine that the USCF could add many services it doesn’t currently offer in a ratings-fee-only revenue model.)
Would the USCF still rate 600,000 games a year if the cost was $1 to $3 higher PER GAME?
In the USCF site uschess.org/ratings/info/events.php
it did not mention events that awards state championship as a restriction to JTP membership. It does mention National Scholastic.
[i]"There are two exceptions to the USCF membership requirement:
Home-school, scholastic-only events (all players are from the same school, which is the site of the tournament).
Primary-school level tournaments, or primary-school sections of larger events, with the exception of the National Scholastics (“primary” means grade 3 and below).
In these cases, participants may choose the Junior Tournament Player (JTP) option, available to anyone 20 or younger and grade 12 or below who has never been a USCF member."[/i]
That makes sense, for the state champion to be recognized by USCF he/she must be a member.
So, state championship can still have Primary division to get rated using JTP option so long that it do not ask USCF to recognized them. Run just like any other tournament.
USCF recognition for just the K-3’s is irrelevant anyway. Getting the kids to taste the rating system is more important in my personal opinion.
Given the number of e-mails that the USCF gets every two months about placement on various Top-100 lists (mostly the age-specific ones), I suspect the parents of a state primary school champion who isn’t considered a state champion and/or listed in Chess Life because the event was a JTP event might not be very happy about it.
If the state championship events had never been submitted for rating before what’s the difference. It use to be not rated, getting it rated now is an step forward.
BTW, our state recognize champions in each division. And to be honest, I will be as happy to see my child’s name in OUR state website as a champion, rather than in Chess Life. I’m not trying to belittle Chess Life in anyway, I think it’s a great chess magazine. I’m just trying to emphasize that small state charter can not make leap just like that.
I don’t believe there is one, per se. However, if state champions have to be USCF members, and JTPs are not members after the end of the tournament, this would seem to follow.
When I first started collecting various rules and regulations in preparation for writing the online system, this was one of the inconsistencies that I came up with, because I recall it having come up at a Delegates meeting a number of years ago, though it isn’t specifically mentioned in the places where JTP is cited.
The USCF office staff confirmed my recollection.
However, I don’t see anything on the website about it.
The ‘Delegate Actions of Continuing Interest’ refer to a motion from 1980 having to do with the duties and rights of state chapters, but I don’t have the minutes from that far back.
As I recall, it was part of a Delegate motion one of the first years that I was a Delegate, so it may be in the minutes from 1987-1992.
Judy checked the list of state champions from the April issue, it doesn’t specifically mention a membership requirement, but that’s not where I’d expect to see that requirement listed anyway.
Personally, I don’t think it’s unreasonable on the USCF’s part to only recognize USCF members as state champions.
I can go either way on this one, but I think we may want to ask the Delgates to clarify the JTP rules with regard to state primary championship events. Whether the Delegate should also address the overall issue of recognition of state champions is a separate question.
The only reluctance I have here is that once the subject’s open for discussion there’s always the possibility that the Delegates choose to further restrict JTP events or eliminate the JTP option completely, they’ve been whittling away at JTP events for over a decade.
This only applies to memberships submitted through the TD/Affiliate Support Area, secure.uschess.org/TD_Affil
After you have submitted a membership batch for processing, the ‘Display Temporary Membership Cards’ button will be activated on the list of your membership batches towards the bottom of the page. Print them on your printer, cut them out, and give them to your players.
If the memberships in your batch are being paid for by credit card, these will be temporary membership cards indicating when their membership expire, otherwise they will be temporary ID cards which non-members can use to keep track of ther ID numbers until the membership payments are received and processed by the USCF office and their membership cards are sent out.
When we get the new webstore running, we should be able to include a temporary membership card as part of the receipt that the member can print out after the web order has been processed.