“S- eight. I almost said seven; I just turned eight.”

Great. I’m playing against a just-turned-eight-year-old. Win, lose, or draw there’s no way this match ends well.

He leads with his king’s pawn. I counter with the Sicilian defense. He advances a pawn to c3, and the game is on.

Chess is as eternal as anything made by mortal hands. The associations that run these tournaments are not. This one had the smell of lingering death on it.

There are two kinds of customers that a business needs to survive. The first is the regular. Regulars keep you in business; they spend a lot of money, they pitch in to help out, they show up when you have an event. They can be counted on to take some pain and keep coming back, within reason. The guy with his name on a bar stool is definitionally a regular. So is the church lady who volunteers to help with VBS, or the Ricochetti with the Thatcher membership. You know who you are.

The flip side of that coin is the Newbie. He doesn’t spend as much money. If he has a bad experience he’s unlikely to come back. The guy trying paintball for the first time because it sounds cool is a newbie, as is the church shopper, or the podcast listener whose yet to put the proverbial skin in the game.

In this tournament, the kid is the regular and I’m the newbie. Sure, I’ve been playing the game for a quarter of a century longer, but I’ve never participated in a chess tournament before. He’s Rated (1086) and got his own chess coach. He’s done this before, and he’s serious about it.

Some moves later he’s threatening a fork. His knight can take my pawn and attack both my queen and my rook at the same time. I could defend, or I could use the time he spends taking my rook to checkmate him. If it works then at least the match will be over quickly. I move my bishop. He forks me. I do my best to look like it’s unexpected and like I’m moving at random. I put my queen into striking position.

He pushes a pawn. Not only does it prevent checkmate, but it also threatens my queen. I can’t even save my rook from the fork.

This is not good.

It’s tempting to cater strictly to the regulars, but if you do only that then you die. Your regulars will come every time, until they don’t. People move, people get married, people pass away. If you’re never bringing in new blood to replace the regulars then eventually you won’t have a customer base at all. You’ve got to keep attracting new customers, and you’ve got to convert newbies into regulars.

When I say this organization has the smell of death about it, I mean that it caters almost exclusively to regulars. Most of these things I could see just reading the flyer. Let’s run down the list.

• The tournament happened over Friday, Saturday, and Sunday of Thanksgiving weekend. I only made it to that one because my family was out of the country at the time. You’ve got to be pretty bought in to spend a long weekend on one tournament.
• $40 entry ($45 on site), and playing requires you to have a $40 annual membership in the federation. You can’t make a casual determination to enter this tournament. Eighty-five bucks is a lot to ask of someone who just wants something to do on Black Friday. The prize support is a good proportion of the take, but the most an unrated player can realistically expect to make is $90. Not much of a profit.
• Time control. This is the way it’s described on the flyer: “Rounds 1-4 & 6: 45/2, SD/1 d5. Round 5: G/120 d5” No explanation. I spent about two hours on the internet trying to figure out what that means without success.*  Plainly this is something you’re expected to already understand.

I was the only unrated player at that tournament. Two weeks later in Madison, I was still the only new guy.

I’ve taken the knight back, but I’m still two points behind. Then he makes his mistake. He pushes the wrong pawn. I take with my pawn. Now my pawn is threatening his knight, but it also unblocked the long white diagonal. My queen is aimed squarely at his rook.

He moves a pawn in front of the rook, and I take his knight.

We’re even again.

If I were to host a chess tournament, here’s how I’d do things differently:

• No hotel conference room. I asked the gentleman who runs the local game store if he’d be willing to run a chess tournament. “Absolutely.” The store is clean, spacious, and well lit, and he’s willing to lend us the space just to drive traffic in the door. Cuts down on overhead.
• If you noticed, the tournament took three days and played six rounds. That’s what happens when you expect one chess game to take six hours. You can play a fine game of chess in one hour. If it’s less precise than high-level tournament chess then it’s at least more interesting to watch. Allot an extra five minutes per player if they’re (optionally) writing down the moves. That lets you turn around rounds in 75 minutes, and get everyone in and out in one day’s time.
• Entry- $10 at most, no memberships required. Then award a small prize to each player for each game they win. You won your game? Here’s $2. Most players won’t run a profit, but they’ll feel better for getting something back. You’d still want prize support for placing, and for other things.
• Fun. Necessarily loosely defined, but I’d want to make it feel more friendly than your usual chess tournament. Allow people to talk in the room. Offer some silly prizes, which aren’t based on how well a person is doing in the games. I’d also post bounties on a couple of the local Chess Club members. If you can beat them you get an additional small prize. You get the idea.

I’ve got the advantage now, but he’s still in it. I’ve still got minor pieces but he’s still got a rook. He moves his king to the wrong spot. I take his pawn with my last knight, and fork his king and queen.

He can take it back, but only with the pawn that he moved to defend his rook. My queen is still lying in wait.

What can he do? He takes the knight. It’s better to lose a rook than a queen. Even so, he’s down enough on material that the end comes quick.

What else is there to say? I won three and lost three that tournament, which took down the unrated bracket. They didn’t hit the expected 50 players, so I didn’t get the expected $90. I got the scaled-down prize of $65. I folded $30 of that into entry into another tournament, but did very poorly. Mentally I was already checked out of it.

At this point, I don’t really expect to do much more tournament level chess. Once was worthwhile. I don’t see it being worth the time and money. I did go so far as to plug my opponent’s ratings into an online calculator to see what mine worked out to be.

Aww, yeah

* The time control works out to two hours for each player for the first 45 moves, then one hour each of sudden death. Round five the entire game has to happen in 120 minutes. In all rounds, you get a five-second delay on the clock after each move. Because, darn it, someone ought to explain that somewhere on the internet.