29
I am not an arbiter, but here's what the rules say:
Rule 4.3 (emphasis added)
if the player having the move touches on the chessboard, with the intention of moving or capturing
I think it should be clear to any reasonable person that picking up a piece that was knocked down by a spectator does not imply intent to move.
Perhaps the arbiter went with an ...
19
When FIDE tournament rules apply: If you displace one or more pieces – knocking off the board, intentionally or unintentionally, is a displacement – you have to re-establish the correct position on your own time (Art. 7.4.1). While it is not specifically mentioned, I would say that you have to do this at once; if you wait, that could be regarded as an ...
18
There are actually three different distinctions in the USCF system that have to do with a 2200 rating.
First is the National Master title. It is awarded to anyone who has ever had an established (not provisional) rating of over 2200. Once a player is a National Master, they have the title for life no matter what happens to their rating. The NM title has no ...
17
According to the Laws of Chess:
7.4.1 If a player displaces one or more pieces, he shall re-establish the correct position in his own time.
Of course, in this situation, it is not the player who displaced one or more pieces. I believe that another rule would therefore be in effect:
7.6 If, during a game it is found that any piece has been displaced ...
13
When did this happen? Because there is no reasonable interpretation of the current rules by which a TD should have upheld the touch-move claim.
I went back and looked at the 3rd Edition rulebook, and it doesn't say that a piece has to be "on the chessboard" to count for touch-move. So in 1987, a TD who was being a "strict constructionist" about the rules ...
9
USCF has regular chess tournaments listed in different states each month and you can find tournaments such as Chicago Open, Philadelphia Open, etc, in-which, you can play at any levels (Under 2200, Under 2000, etc). You have to be a USCF member to play these tournaments which is an easy process and you can register and pay it online at the USCF website.
...
9
Per FIDE rules 6.10a and 6.10b (I am including the latter since it is so closely related in that it can require the arbiter to adjust the times based on judgment):
6.10 a. Every indication given by the clocks is considered to be conclusive in the absence of any evident defect. A chess clock
with an evident defect shall be replaced. The ...
8
The USCF has two independent systems for naming players' levels:
1) Rating-based: Senior Master (2400+), National Master (2200-2399), Expert (2000-2199), Class A (1800-1999), Class B (1600-1799), etc. This describes your current rating; you can be Class A today and Class B next week. The one exception is that once your rating gets to 2200, you are a master ...
7
The correct decision here is to send the players back to finish their game. There's a very good rule of thumb that TD's use in situations like this - if the two players don't agree on the result of the game (there's no "meeting of the minds" between the players), they should go back to the board and continue the game.
It's up to the TD to set the clock ...
7
It might be better to start in a smaller tournament group. I've had luck with meetup.com (where you'll find even smaller groups than the club list on USCF, sometimes), finding at least 3-4 clubs in my area that host USCF rated tournaments. The ratings might be inflated/deflated at the small clubs, because you get a lot of people playing the same people over ...
7
You don't have grounds to demand the time control you like. In practice I suppose that if your opponent agrees, you could get away with using whatever time control you both want as long as the game finishes on time, which is the main point the organizers care about.
One thing that the USCF rules do cover is what to do if the stipulated time control has a ...
7
Is it OK per the rules to adjust your opponent's pieces?
YES
The rules are clear:
4.2.1 Only the player having the move may adjust one or more pieces on their squares, provided that he first expresses his intention (for
example by saying “j’adoube” or “I adjust”).
4.2.2 Any other physical contact with a piece, except for clearly accidental ...
6
A "real" rating is gained by joining the USCF and playing rated tournaments. You can get a rating from any USCF sanctioned tournament. They don't have to be all-weekend tournamants; I've played in several G30 tournaments that had 3 rounds in one evening. In addition, you and an opponent can play a rated match if a USCF tournament director approves it.
...
6
Check the USCF web site. They'll list chess clubs in your area. Find one that suits you, pay your USCF membership, and play!
6
This was more of a problem with the earlier generation (early 2000's) of digital clocks. One of them had a fault which meant that if you gave it a bit of a smack then the battery might jiggle inside, momentarily interrupting the electricity supply and it would reset.
The post 2010 clocks don't have this problem, probably they just fitted a small capacitor ...
5
According to my copy of US Chess Federation's Official Rules of Chess (5th Edition), rule 14B2 states:
If a player offers a draw while the opponent's clock is running, the
opponent may accept or reject the offer. A player who offers a draw
in this manner may be warned or penalized for annoying the opponent (20G).
Note that it says "may", not "must". ...
5
I suspect it's a result of you not really knowing the rating of the player you're playing. Posted rating for a player in a tournament is typically already out of date. You can see it in more detail by checking the actual rating report of the event you played in (http://www.uschess.org/datapage/event-search.php) and you can see what the real rating of the ...
5
Start here: Pennsylvania State Chess Federation. The state organizations almost always have a better list of clubs than the USCF.
You join the USCF simply by paying them money. There's nothing else required. But you can show up at a local club without a USCF membership, just to get a "feel" for how tournaments run and how players behave. You'll have to join ...
5
You are close, but not quite right.
I just spoke with a friend of mine, who has been a tournament director for over 40 years, USCF Senior TD Henry L. Terrie III (Hal Terrie). He told me that when you post a USCF tournament, you need to specify the delay, or it is assumed to be 5 seconds.
So, while you cannot demand G/25 d5, you can demand G/30 d5 since it ...
4
I'm not aware of an API, but they way they have it set up it's pretty easy to gather data via a technique called screen/web scraping.
For example, a search on your name gives a link to a specific page with your member id in the URL. Then if you have a programming language/library that is DOM-aware, you can simply figure out where certain things will be, ...
4
I don't know about USCF rules, but according to FIDE Laws of Chess, article 9.1.b.1:
A player wishing to offer a draw shall do so after having made a move on the chessboard and before pressing his clock. An offer at any other time during play is still valid but Article 11.5 must be considered.
Where article 11.5 is about distracting the opponent and ...
4
You do not get moved out of your bracket. If you're a B-player in the Expert section, expect to finish at the bottom. I'm not even sure if you're allowed to 'play up' unless you play in the open section.
4
If the tournament advance publicity specifies G/30 with no delay, then that is the time control. There is nothing in the USCF rulebook that would give you or your opponent either grounds to request a different time control, nor discretion to agree to a different time control. Per USCF rule 5B1c and 5B2, the time control really should appear in the ...
4
Per Chris Bird, the USCF's "FIDE Events Manager", the USCF only pays for GM, IM, WGM, and WIM titles. FM(WFM) and CM(WCM) are the responsibility of the player. The USCF still applies on your behalf, but you pay the fee.
The fees are currently as follows:
Grandmaster/WGM: 330 Euro
International Master/WIM: 165 Euro
FIDE Master/WFM: 70 Euro
Candidate ...
3
As can be verified by looking at player information on http://uschess.org, RSUPP_YR and RSUPP_NUM are the year and month of the latest supplement with a rating for that player (which is in the R_LPB_RAT columns). If you looked up a sample player who has a P in R_PLR_TYP, it wouldn't be hard to confirm whether that means that the rating is provisional.
3
How much rating you lose or gain depend (besides your and your opponents rating) on the K-factor. If your opponent has a different K-factor than you do, the gain/loss of rating can be asymmetrical.
In the Fide Elo system the K-factor depends on rating and age. Apparently the USCF has a K-factor that is dependent on the number of games played overall and in ...
3
If I were a TD at this tournament, here is how I would rule in this situation after speaking with both opponents separately and getting their account of what happened (assuming what both said lines up with what's given in the question), and why I would rule that way:
Telling an opponent during a rated game that they should resign is at best rude, and at ...
3
There is no way to directly compare ratings from distinct populations.
However, it's not true that online chess and OTB populations are really distinct. There are players who have ratings in both OTB and online chess.
So, you can compare your rating this way: Find players in Chesscube who has also OTB ratings, select two of them, both have ratings close ...
3
I don't think that the USCF has a full API, but there are a few special url's that you can use for simplified screen scraping/data parsing:
http://msa.uschess.org/thin.php
http://msa.uschess.org/thin2.php
http://msa.uschess.org/thin3.php
In each of those "thin" pages, you can pass a member ID as a url parameter (for example thin3.php?11111111).
The server ...
3
To obtain the FIDE title of Candidate Master (CM), it is required to have a FIDE rating of 2200 or more. See the FIDE handbook or Wikipedia. The title is for life.
According to Wikipedia, the USCF title of Expert is awarded to players rated from 2000 to 2199 (USCF rating!). The title is not for life.
So, the two titles depend on two different ratings. The ...
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