New State vs State Tournament Please Read!!

We need more players from the group participating so that we can do a better job than we did last time. So please join the first match when it is available.

This is what Dietmar (the host for the st vs st tourney) is saying.

I know you are dying to know the division composition so we are no longer holding you at the edge of the seats. A little bit about the thought process behind. We have a record 31 states participating despite the dropout of Kansas, Texas, and Missouri where we received no feedback from the admins despite repeated attempts. We are pleased to announce that original members Georgia and Wisconsin are back in the mix. We welcome the new members New Hampshire, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, and Massachussetts to the league. A big round of applause to them for joining the competition. Also, a call to the more seasoned teams to help the along to get into the groove. So if you see a match incorrectly set up for instance (let's say "2 concurrent games" isn't checked), point it out, have the match cancelled as early as possible and set it up again with the correct parameters.

Despite the increase in teams we decided to stick with the 3 division format. We think that smaller divisions lead to more unbalanced matchups and make it rather difficult to determine split lines. As a result, we agreed to the following split:

Division 1: Iowa, New Jersey, New Mexico, North Carolina, Michigan, Minnesota, Ohio, Ontario,  South Carolina, Washington (10 teams)

As you can see both Div 2 finalists moved up while no one got demoted to account for the increase in teams.

Division 2: Arizona, California, Colorado, Florida, Illinois, Kentucky,  Oregon, South Dakota, Virginia, Wisconsin (10 teams)

As in Division 1 we promoted the two finalists up (Arizona & South Dakota) while last place finisher Oklahoma was replaced with returning team Wisconsin who's membership number don't make them a good fit for Division 3. Colorado also moved up as currently in third place as we like to have Division 3 with an odd number of teams.

Division 3: Connecticut, Georgia, Indiana, Louisiana, Maryland, Massachussetts, Mississippi, New Hampshire, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Utah (11 teams)

As 31 is a prime number one division is going to have to deal with byes. Division 3 it is where from past experience it is more likely that one team may withdraw. We hope it won't happen. All the teams new to the league are in here.

As for the rules, we only made a few minor tweaks. Minimum number of players in Division 1 goes up to 10 from 9. Rule 10 has been amended to read:

10. Teams may not remove players from their roster to obtain a more favorable matchup.Team admins may remove players from their roster who exceed a timeout ratio of 25%. Removed players need to be published in the team match thread prior to commencement of match. Example: Player A was removed in accordance with timeout rule: Timeout ratio 55%.

A new provision was added that reads:

Teams are encouraged to use the AutoStart features when issueing the challenge. When using the feature, set the start time to 7PM (that time is PT by default as the chess.com servers are located on the west coast) of the day shown on the schedule.

Here is the schedule (which will be repeated in your division thread)

Schedule:

While you are digesting this we will be preparing the pairings and post them into the individual division threads.

We hope that you like the setups and wish all teams good luck for the upcoming season. Again, we like to express our thanks for the cooperation from all the teams. We are happy to see that this competition has a very low rate of account closings due to cheating compared to other leagues. Let's keep it this way and reduce the number of closed accounts down to zero. Good luck!