Parents: Preparing for a Chess Tournament
September 1, 2010
Tags: Learning Chess Articles, Teaching Chess Articles
This is the first posting in a series of 4 articles comprising A Parent’s Guide to Tournament Chess:
1. Preparing for a Chess Tournament
2. During a Chess Tournament
3. Understanding Chess Ratings
4. The Swiss System for Chess Tournaments
Written by Robert N. Bernard for Wholesale Chess
So your child has been playing chess for a while, and his or her chess teacher has suggested they play in a tournament. Your child begs you to play; “They even have trophies – big ones!” the child exclaims. You relent, and the chess teacher provides the time and place. How should you prepare? Once you get there, what should you expect?
Many kids’ first tournaments are small, local gatherings (of perhaps 10-20 participants), but some are noticeably larger. Most of what’s written here applies to most of the tournaments in the USA and Canada, but there will always be some variation.
Before the Chess Tournament
Buy a tournament chess set, chess board, and scorebook. Plastic chess sets and vinyl chess boards work well, and, if your child is in elementary school, the spaces in which to write moves on the scorebook should be large enough to accommodate a child’s larger handwriting.
Unless you have an older child who has played with a chess clock before, you will probably not need a chess clock at first, but if they play in more and more tournaments they will need one.
Rule #1: Pack Food!
On the morning of the tournament, there’s Rule Number One – pack food. Chess tournaments on the weekend are held in elementary schools, roadside hotels, libraries, and multi-purpose rooms, and the dining options are usually limited to non-existent. You might think that you will have time between games to go out and get something, but don’t count on it – the games are typically played in as short a time as possible.
At the tournament, parents frequently are afraid that their child will lose their first game and then be sent home. In the vast majority of chess tournaments, this is not the case; each child will play one game for each round of the tournament – there are no eliminations. Also, larger tournaments are broken into sections by “chess ratings”, a estimation of skill level of the player, but in a child’s first tournament, they will not have a rating and be called an “unrated” player. The tournament director determines the “pairings” (Which child plays which other child) usually with help of a computer program. The pairings are usually posted on a wall or door on what’s called the “pairing sheet”, one for each section of the tournament.
The pairing sheet is easy to find – it will be where the crowd gathers when the tournament director announces, “Pairings are up!” Each row of the pairing sheet first lists a “board number” that corresponds to a placard adjacent to a chess board on a table, the names of two players indicating who is to play what color (the player with the white pieces is listed first), and two columns which are blank, for the result (1 – 0 White wins; 0 – 1 Black wins; 0.5 – 0.5 draw).
Robert N. Bernard is the manager of the New Jersey Knockouts of the United States Chess League, where he started three years ago as the Knockouts’ blogger. For the USCL, he also compiles an unofficial rating list and weekly power rankings. Frequently, he can be found on the Internet Chess Club, where he has a weird tendency to win a lot of their trivia contests. He is also a member of the United State Chess Federation’s Ratings Committee and coaches his son’s chess team. He has a very nice plaque from the 1982 US Amateur Team Championship, where he captained the team that won the Under 1400 prize.
