Musings From a First-Time Tournament Organizer – Daily Chess Musings
Josh Wilson
April 17, 2024
There is a line from the 1998 film Six Days Seven Nights where Harrison Ford retorts to Anne Heche, “It’s an island, babe. If you don’t bring it here, you won’t find it here.” While Ford was responding to Heche’s optimism about finding the magic of romance on a faraway island, the sentiment rings true about finding scholastic chess opportunities in the rural mountains of Montana.
My personal experience participating in scholastic chess began and ended in elementary school in the 90s. I showed an interest in chess that progressed from beating my dad on the living room floor to challenging kids during recess. My mother would enter me in Friday night tournaments at a local school where the main attraction was all-you-can-eat pizza and soda, and you played against about ten players who were roughly the same rating based on the group’s informal system. I won a lot of trophies, ate a bunch of pizza, and my mother would get 2 hours to herself with her son safely supervised in a multipurpose room. My parents nor I didn’t know there was anything more to chess than that, and after a brief time playing, my interests drifted elsewhere.
Fast forward 25 years, life takes me from California to Montana, and I find myself playing chess more and more with my third grader on the living room floor. He’s showing legitimate interest in the game, and I know he needs opportunities to play other kids his age and skill level. With the nearest tournament two hours away and starting at 9:30 AM, we rented a hotel room and hoped the winter weather wouldn’t close the highway. He was nervous, but he took second place against 30 elementary school players, and from that moment on, he was hooked.
The entire trip home was asking about the next time he could play chess, and much to my disappointment, it would be months before another tournament, let alone a scholastic, would be offered in the area. So I did what needed to be done, and I channeled the Harrsion Ford spirit and proceeded to bring it to the area. I spoke with the principal at my son’s school and asked about starting an afterschool chess club. In the first year, we had 40 students from grades 2 – 5 who met the last few months of the school year. We focused on having fun and learning, and my son was happy to have other kids to play with.
At the start of the next school year, my wife, who works at the school, started to get questions from the kids about when the chess club was going to start next. I planned to start after the winter break and sent out the email. I was shocked to have over 70 students sign up for this year’s chess club, and at that point, it became clear there was enough interest to hold our first scholastic tournament for the area.
Borrowing the format from the scholastic tournament my son was playing in the city a few hours away, we ran a four-round Swiss format and created divisions from elementary, middle, and high school players. Through playing in a few tournaments across the state, we were fortunate to know a local player who had the software to run the tournament, and he agreed to help be the tournament director. I had the boards from the chess club but not the clocks, so we kept the games without time controls, but I would time the games to about 25 minutes and introduce a clock if I saw the game was stalled or the players were moving too slowly. This seemed to work well at the other unrated scholastic tournaments my son played in, and it was the only viable path to making the tournament work.
I started promoting this to my club early in the year, but the true marketing did not start until about one month before the April tournament date. I created flyers, dropped them off with schools, and sent emails to all the districts to help promote the free tournament, marketed as a great experience for your first time playing in a tournament. Players were asked to register beforehand using an online form. I was also able to get a local tree trimmer, who happened to be an excellent woodworker, to donate his time to make trophies from the wood he saved from his jobs. The school generously allowed us to use the gym without a cost.
About a week before the tournament, we had just about 30 players, and I breathed a sigh of relief at the fact that we had enough players. We only had one sign-up in the high school division, but this seemed like a manageable issue in combining middle and high school players. The week of the tournament is when a majority of the registrations came in, even up until 5:30 AM the morning of the tournament. We had a count of 67 players – 6 high school, 23 middle school, and 38 elementary school players. This was going to be fun – and I started to get very nervous.
The “what ifs” of having enough players turned into what if we didn’t have enough trophies (we had an extra set made for ties), or an odd number of players in each division, or kids didn’t really know how to play. Over the three-and-a-half-hour tournament, it all came true.
We learned after we got everyone checked in, crossed off the no-shows, and enrolled the never-registereds that we did have an uneven number of players in every division. We asked for volunteers for any middle school players wanting to move up to play high schoolers. An even number of players came down – no help there, and we didn’t want to pick who couldn’t play up after they bravely asked to play stronger competition. So we went with forced byes, and a few parents volunteered to play with those kids during the rounds.
As the rounds went on, it became clear that some of the players knew how to move the pieces but didn’t know all of the rules of the game. I had somewhat counted on this by having a few clocks to help move games along, but I wasn’t counting on some players not knowing rules like kings cannot move next to other kings and that you cannot leave a king in check. I spent most of my time around these tables to monitor the games while also trying to make sure others who finished early weren’t talking to their friends who were still playing their games.
At the end of the tournament, we found that every section had a tie, with elementary being the most. Two players tied with four points, and we had a seven-way tie for second place for those with three points. I explained to the players and parents that we were using the US Chess tiebreaker rules, which the system computed, and I awarded the extra set of trophies to the elementary division. Generally, everyone seemed OK with this, but a few players missed out on a trophy, and this was the biggest learning moment for organizing a tournament.
The experience was ultimately rewarding, and I had many players and parents of all different ages express their appreciation for having the opportunity to play so close to their homes. This was the first tournament for many players, and for that I am happy to have done this. There was much to learn from the organizing and directing side of running a tournament, but it hasn’t deterred me from moving forward with the goal of running a rated scholastic tournament in the area.
