Directing a Chess Tournament

There is a school somewhat near me that runs a scholastic chess tournament around this time of year. I am now too old to play in it, but its organizer (who goes to the local chess club) asked me and my father to help manage it - there are usually almost thirty kids there, from kindergarten to eighth grade.

It went on today, and 27 players showed up. I was assigned to be the section director for the youngest part, K through 2. There were only seven players, which is manageable, but having an odd number of players in a round robin does add some difficulty. Instead of setting one person as the "anchor" and having everyone else move in a cycle around the table (which would require every game to be completed before moving), I manually set up matches and let kids having a tough time take a break. This strategy worked very well, especially after taking other section directors' advice to place a clock on games that were taking a (relatively) very long time.

There was some minor drama in the beginning when there were three people all not playing (two had just finished a game) and neither of the remaining possible pairs wanted to play. I picked two of them and had them play, so it wasn't really that much of a problem.

Later, I also presented the awards for the 6-8 section, which was fun. (Congratulating people is easy.) After all the awards were complete, I played a relatively small simul with the people who had not left already - there were five or so.

Presenting an "honorable mention" medallion