What is the state today of Over the Board Chess, and the USCF?

hihi

Aside:  I don't start threads like this just to whine and annoy.  I do intend to get back into the Chess world at some point, even if it won't be this weekend.  (My wife and I talked about budget issues last night.  It would be impolitic to spend 50+ dollars on Chess this weekend, so that's the final decision on that subject.)  When I do, I will be working on making OTB Chess affordable and accessible.  Threads like this actually play a part in that effort.

I've been a lifelong member of the Society for Creative Anachronism, the largest medieval recreation group.  That's the benchmark I use for what things ought to cost.

A typical event of ours these days involves a tournament of armored combat with wooden swords, and another tournament with fencing weapons.  In addition there is usually some sort of craft classes, demonstrations, or judged competitions.  There may also be music, archery, axe throwing, games (including Chess tournaments) and general merriment.  The typical site fee is 10 dollars for a day event, but I have paid 12.  Lunch is provided for sale, but in rare cases is included in the site fee.  (If they think the fighters won't eat otherwise.)

Adult membership is 30 dollars per year. Membership is required for fighters and fencers.  Officers are required to buy a more expensive, 45 dollar, membership that includes electronic versions of monthly publications.  Print versions add more on top of that.  People  not fighting or fencing are not required to have any membership, but they pay an additional five dollar fee to attend an event.

The primary cost to the SCA corporation, and the driver of the membership fee, is the cost of the liability insurance policy that covers all of the official events.

Summary:  SCA events are a lot more complex, and we provide liability insurance, but they are cheaper than all but the lowest end Chess tournaments.

Whew!  Lets all take a deep breath.  

One thing that we take for granted nowadays is the pairing software that TDs use to run tournaments.  It's worth taking a moment to remember how it was 40, 30 even 20 years ago.  Pairing cards were shuffled and prayers made to hope everything would come out right.  Pen, pencil & raw brain power often made mistakes and the start of rounds was often delayed.  Tournament directors needed nerves of steel to endure impatient & often angry chess players eager to play.

Time controls have been adjusted to avoid adjourned games (anyone remember those?) and secondary TCs are becoming extinct.  TDs got smart and favor using a few seconds delay or  better yet, The Increment.  These measures have drastically reduced the need for TDs to step in and make a decision on the outcome of a game using The Rule Book.  A local TD's popularity could hang in the balance if someone thought they were 'cheated'.  I know a few cases where harsh words were exchanged.  Sometimes, even more.

It's still not perfect but let's thank technology for making the OTB experience better    

I'm a lifetime member of the USCF and I've barely done anything other than change my address and ask a clarification on  some rules here and there, in the last 5 years. I haven't played a rated USCF game since the 90's.

I got the lifetime membership many year ago, when they were about to increase the price by a substantial amount. Still, being a lifetime member does give me more "street cred" when I'm at over-the-board chess clubs, especially if I'm just visiting because I happen to be traveling near the chess club when it meets.

Doesn't help me win more games though. 😋

The primary cost of a chess tournament is the site. Organizers probably should also have liability insurance, but other than larger organizations and events, the margins are so small that it might not be feasible.

Costs have to account for the site and to cover whatever prizes the TD/organizer thinks will pull the highest number of players. 

A lucky organizer will have access to a free or inexpensive site, but that may not be feasible, especially for multi-day events.

One of the sites I have used in the past was $400 a day, plus tax. Add in at least one month of the print TLA, for $30-40 and you have to pull 45 players if you charge a $10 entry and that is with no prizes at all for a one-day event. Add prizes and the entry has to increase. If you want to pull players from outside a small radius of your location, the entry has to be higher, to give a decent prize fund.

That is also assuming the TD doesn't want any compensation to cover food, potential travel, or material costs.

Sites are a huge problem.  I've been doing SCA events for years, and it used to be much easier to find sites.  Costs have gone up, and many more restrictions have been added on and on.  I've blamed liability as the primary cause.  We carry liability because we have to.  We're doing full contact martial arts and, in a possibly even more dangerous activity, we sometimes have amateurs preparing and serving food.

Chess at least has lower health risks, but with this being America, anyone can get sued.  It isn't a necessity to have liability for Chess, though.  Some sites, at least, will let you in without proof of insurance, but I'll bet a lot of churches and similar locations that used to let Chess tournaments in have stopped doing it on advice of their lawyers.

However, regardless, a point of my description was to note that the SCA provides more services than USCF and does so at a lower cost.  How?

The answer is fairly straightforward.  There are two primary elements.   First is prizes.  In the SCA, cash prizes are taboo.  They aren't illegal in the rules, but they just aren't done.  Once in a great while I've seen a cash equivalent, I.e. a gift card, but the most common prize for a tournament is no prize at all.  Second, we have a culture of pure volunteer labor.  This organization with somewhere around 50,000 active members has a couple of paid office staff to handle the correspondence, and that's it.  Everyone else is volunteer.  

The prize culture of the chess community was the hardest thing for me to wrap my head around when I first started playing Chess a dozen or so years ago.  You like the game, but you won't play it unless you have a chance to win some money?  It was foreign to me.  And then when someone insisted I take money for serving as a TD?  That just seemed strange.  I wouldn't take it.  He insisted. We compromised.  I took enough to cover my gas and parking.

One of this initiatives I would very much like to see would be a push, starting from the central office, to train a lot more club and local level TDs, so that it wouldn't seem so "special" to be a TD, and the idea of compensation would vanish for anything less than CCA style, large, commercial events.  This suggestions wasn't met with happiness, though, and I (sort of) understand why.  I was arguing not just for a practical change, but a cultural one.

Most players probably rarely win prizes, but if you want to draw outside players, they usually want a chance to recoup some expenses (travel and food if entry is a non-issue). 

I've held $10 entry tourneys in the past and most of my one-day events are $30.  In general, I get more players with the higher entry, higher prize funds. I also normally volunteer my time in organizing and being the TD. I run a couple of two-day events a year in a town an hour away from me, and if the event does really well, I'll use some of the extra to offset my room, food and gas expenses.

As far as I'm aware, most TDs do things in a very similar manner. They volunteer their time and take the financial risks in running events. I haven't hit on a perfect formula or setup to pull vastly more players, but I generally get a little better turnouts with a larger prize fund, though at certain point that amount doesn't draw too many more players.

I've played in some very low entry, minor prize events before. If your region will support that, great. 

There is no doubt that prizes draw more players.  I know it, but I don't understand it.  I can even repeat the words of the explanation, but I can't grasp the mindset.  I just know it's there.

The question is whether there is something inherent about Chess that makes it that way, or is it a cultural expectation that exists because it has been reinforced and an expectation has been set.  I don't know the answer to that question.

Well, I'm one adult who used to be a Federation member, active on the forum, an eager reader of the magazine, and looking forward to participating in tournaments. But i actually quit, because someone created a Trump troll thread in the forum and they refused my request to remove it. I insisted that the forum topics be limited to chess. They did not agree. I quit and was not given a refund. That's ok. You live and learn.

A forum thread here on chess.com or a forum thread on the USCF web site?

Not all chess tournaments have cash prizes.  Half the rated events I play in have an Entry Fee that is just enough to cover the rating fee and the cost of an Affiliate Membership -- I'm talking less than $5.

But many State Affiliates and other long-standing chess organizations try to have prizes so that chess professionals (not the GMs) can earn some money in addition to their teaching and writing earnings.  And the prize money is subsidized by lower rated class players. 

Why do they offer prize money for class players?  I guess it's a form of legalized gambling where the player is betting on his/hers self.  Why is it that every time I go into a convenience store, I see people spending $5-$10-$20 or more on lottery scratch tickets?

A forum thread on the USCF website. 

Their forum was never very active. I was active, friendly, respectful of other forum members. I was there to talk about chess. I complained about the thread on the forum and emailed the director and communicated my concerns to her privately. But USCF decided that they would rather lose a paying member than delete a thread that even some other members did not approve of. 

Since I had a 2-year subscription, that means quitting the USCF cost me, what, $90? But that's ok. I refuse to pay for access to a forum where you have to scroll past troll threads about Trump in order to talk about chess. That is the last time in my life I will pay for access to *any* internet forum.

I learned from my USCF experience that I really don't need a forum or any website to enhance my enjoyment of chess. The chess.com forum is a zoo, and as far as I know they still have not given us the ability to "hide" the posts of people whose posts we don't want to read. But at least I don't have to pay money to look at this forum, which I rarely do these days anyway.

There are some blogs on chess.com that I cherish, but that's about it.

(Emphases added)  

The bold part caught my eye.  As far as I know, the cheapest advertised membership for an adult is 40 dollars.  There is also the super secret membership that the USCF doesn't tell anyone about, which is the two month, 20 dollar membership.  Is there some other back door "Affiliate Memberhsip"?

Or were you excluding membership fees as part of the entry cost.  In other words, I could have gone to a tourney today and paid a five dollar entry fee.  However, I would have also had to pay a 40 dollar USCF membership, and a 10 dollar MCA membership.  

The five dollar entry fee is mostly given back as prizes.  It's rated quads, with 10 bucks for first and 6 bucks for second.  The nature of quads is that over time, most people will win pretty randomly, so the tournament is very low cost, and practically free over the long run.  However, getting in the door has a steep annual payment.

I have no objection to such "penny ante" prizes.  I would prefer not having them, but it's a minor preference.  They wouldn't keep me away.  I can understand why for many people it enhances their enjoyment.  It's not my thing when it comes to Chess, but I do it with poker nights.  It doesn't seem bizarre or irrational to me.

It's the larger prizes I can't grasp.  For a large prize tournament it's obvious that the lower rated players are paying those prize funds.  Why would I do that?  Moreover, why would I prefer to do that over a tournament where I didn't have to do that?  The larger prize tournaments draw more people, so people must prefer giving their money to the best chess players in the room.  I don't understand it.

Pretty sure @Uncle_Bent means the actual affiliate fees. When I was doing the $10 events, I set aside $1 from each entry to go towards the affiliate fee each year.

When I go to a tournament, I want to play as many people as possible that are not the people I play all the time. For a smaller entry fee, a TD will mostly get only local players, people that play each other all the time. Increasing the prize fund makes it more likely outside players will come and give the locals some new players to challenge.

If an area has enough active players, there are a lot more options for types of events, low cost ones for the locals, higher entry events to pull more remote players.

I wasn't including the USCF membership.  So, for $40 annual dues plus an average of $3 per tournament, I play in 10 rated tournaments for another $30.  That's a total of around $70 for 80 hours of rated tournament play.  I consider that dirt-cheap.  And there's been that option of "cheap" tnm'ts since High School, 50 years ago.  You just have to learn the rules, become a local TD, and find a circle of like-minded chess players.

And, at times, I've played in a few Super-tournaments ... 5 World Opens and a couple of Foxwoods events.  In total, those cost me maybe $4,000,, and my tournament winnings are far less than half of that total.... but, I had fun, and just missed out on a $6,000 class prize because of an epic choke in the last round.  C'est la vie.

Chess is one of the least expensive hobbies in America, if you are frugal.  If you've ever had a child engaged in athletics or music or theater, then you know how much more expensive those activities can be.

You're point is well taken, but there is something to be said for playing the same opponents over and over again.  Most of us prepare for each other's opening repertoire, and it makes studying chess more of a joy than a chore.  Plus, if I want to play New opponents, there are plenty of other options available -- I just do it less and less with each passing year.

It is dirt cheap.

But if you only play in one tournament, that's 43 dollars for one day.  (In my case, there would also be another 10 for Michigan Chess Association.) That's getting into some expensive dirt.

If you go to three tournaments, each one is more expensive than going to a movie.  As it turns out, a lot of people don't go to movies because they're too expensive.

The USCF has created a system where it's pretty darned cheap to play, if you immerse yourself in the hobby, but it's pretty expensive if you just dabble in it.  That might be a deliberate decision, but it makes new customer acquisition problematic.

Giving up 10 Sundays a year to play chess, may seem, to you, like I "immerse" myself in chess, but there are tens of millions of Americans who spend 16 Sundays a year watching NFL football, or, who watched every episode of "Game of Thrones" for 7 years.

And I would hope that the USCF never prioritizes chess players who only want to play in one tournament per year.  From a marketing standpoint, that is a miserable waste of time and resources.  Amazon.com would have failed long ago, if it had even concerned itself with those consumers that would only use it's services one time a year. 

Does this mean the the USCF dues policy deters some players from joining?  Well, yes, but it is deterring the least likely segment of players.  That's fine with me.