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This page announces our upcoming tournaments, and has links to the tournaments of other clubs in our area. To see the games from all of our past tournaments, go to our Games page.
Click on the hotel link for a map of the playing site. Here's a map to our regular playing site. You can use the link for a dynamic map where you can zoom and scroll.
Please bring sets, boards and clocks if possible.
Tournament Playing Site Information Playing Site
Casual play is at the
General Tournament Description In general, all of our tournaments are single day events held on the third Saturday of every other month, with the two exceptions noted above. We host two types of tournaments, four round Swiss's and three round Quads. Time control for our Swiss events are Game/60, with round times of 9:30, 11:35, 2:15, and 4:20. Our Quads have time control of Game/80, with round times of 9:30, 1:00 and 3:45. This allows time for lunch before the last two rounds. We usually alternate between the Swiss and Quad format every month. In a quad tournament, you will play opponents close to your own strength. In a Swiss, your opponents will be more varied but the prize fund is higher. Except for our championship tournament, we award cash prizes at our tournaments. At our quads, we award $40 for first place and $20 for second place in each quad. We try to return about two thirds of entry fees in prize money. With the rest we pay for the hotel room, ratings fees, club overhead such as the USCF affiliate fees and this web site, and providing for our charitable fund. The exact prize amounts, the places awarded and the exact rounds times are posted at the tournament site after registration is complete. We are holding our entry fee to $20. We plan to continue offering inexpensive rated tournaments on a bi-monthly basis throughout 2009. In 2010, we are going back to monthly tournaments. We hope attendance is good, but not too good, as we hate to turn people away. We have the capacity for 48 players max, and that's crowded. You can also preregister by mail. We're looking into PayPal, but there are some issues and I might not get to solve them all. You can preregister by mail for any future event that's on the schedule. For more information, contact Bob@McHenryAreaChess.org
How We Handle Swiss Tournament In order to provide a higher quality of
competitive play for all of the entrants to our Swiss events, we reserve the
right to combine the event into a single section, or to divide these tournament into two sections, based on the distribution of
ratings of our entrants. In this way, masters and experts will not have to be
paired against class D or lower rated players, and beginners will not have to
struggle against opponents they have no chance against. While we feel strongly
that much valuable experience can be gained by playing higher rated opponents,
there are realistic limits to how great a difference is reasonable. However, we
will consider requests by anyone who would prefer to play in the upper section.
We expect to use the two section option in events with 20 or more entrants, and where there is a wide range of ratings. We may not always split the field exactly in half, in case of an uneven ratings distribution. For example, if one tournament is attended by a large number of scholastic players, all under 1100, the top section may have far fewer players than the second section. Prize money is proportional to the number of players in your section. We generally return between two thirds and three quarters of entry fees in prize money, and occasionally more. Our normal policy allows for some overhead expenses, such as hotel costs, ratings fees, etc, but unless attendance is very low we make the two thirds mark. We expect this will allow us to offer tournaments which are the most interesting and enjoyable we can provide. We welcome any feedback people wish to make regarding this matter.
No Conflict with cash prizes and sports! There had been concern expressed by some of our younger players that accepting cash prizes at our tournaments might make them ineligible for amateur sports at their schools. We looked into this, and discovered that such fears are completely unnecessary. You are allowed to win any amount of cash at any of our tournaments without it affecting your participation in school athletics. We checked with both the IHSA (Illinois High School Sports Association) and the NCAA (National Collegiate Athletic Association). Although the IHSA does list chess as a sport, they exempt chess prizes from prohibited compensation. Further, their only prohibitions are within the same sport, so if a student wins money in a tennis tournament, they can still play on the high school football team, just not on their tennis team. But even winning money in a chess tournament does not kick you off the school chess team. The NCAA does not consider chess a sport at all, so there are no conflicts. We hope this information encourages our younger players to participate in chess events more often.
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We have been forced to remove the automatic contact form because of an excess of spam, hundreds of emails per day. To prevent this, we are providing a link that will bring up an email form, with our address spoofed by an X in front of our real email address. Simply remove this X to create our real email address, then send it to us. We apologize for the extra effort required, but that's life in the internet age. Send email to McHenry Area Chess
Send mail to
Webmaster@McHenryAreaChess.org with
questions or comments about this web site.
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