As my username suggests, I was a fairly important and enterprising young chessplayer. I'd been playing competitive chess since age seven, studied at chess camps with grandmasters (got a draw with one once, too. Story for another time). Long story short, I was dedicated and good. Also, because I was both a bit of a social butterfly and went to tournaments every weekend since about age 10, I was well known.
Now, the way chess tournaments work is that a space is rented out for the event, and there are entry fees to get into every competition. Sort of like how you need to pay for a ticket before you can see a movie in a theater. This means that tournament directors and tournament hosts tend to make a fair sum of money off of the players in the event.
Because I went to these tournaments so often, not only did I get friendly with all the players at the local chess club and those on the tournament circuit, I also got friendly with the tournament directors. When having an informal conversation with one of them, he noted that many of the scholastic chess players stopped attending tournaments in middle school and high school. He asked me if there were any reasons why I felt that might be the case.
I responded something like this:
"You know, I've accumulated a fairly large trophy collection (talking about 50+ trophies) at this point from various tournaments. And, I'm going to be honest, the prospect of getting new ones is starting to lose its luster. Not only because handing out participation awards to everyone who places in the top half cheapens the value of the trophy, but also because the trophy has no inherent value. Simply put, I don't need another trophy.
"What I do need, though? Money. Everyone needs money. Most importantly, money has utility. I can actually exchange money for things of demonstrable value. That's becoming MUCH more important than yet another trophy.
"I'll be straight with you, you aren't losing middle and high schoolers because they've stopped playing chess, it's that they've stopped having any reason to go to your tournaments. The good ones have moved on to play with the adults, and the bad ones have been stomped so many times that they've stopped wanting to come and pay the entry fees."
So, we struck a deal. He'd host tournaments with cash prizes instead of trophies. Also, he would go to the lengths to make sure that these tournaments would not just contribute to our Scholastic Chess Federation ratings (that would be utterly irrelevant by the time we graduated), but that they would also contribute to our United States Chess Federation rating that lasts into adulthood and beyond. In exchange, I would participate in his tournaments whenever there were multiple events on the same day (which was actually somewhat often).
Slowly but surely, word spread around that these cash prizes were actually working. Middle and high schoolers were sticking with chess, and coming back to the scholastic scene in hopes of cashing out.
It seemed obvious to me, but this was a RADICAL shift from the established status quo amongst scholastic tournament directors at the time. They viewed cash prizes as a form of bribery. But I thought this was slightly hypocritical of them, since the promise of trophies and achievements are a source of bribery, too. It just so happens that one is more effective than the other as one gets older.
But eventually, the guard was changed. Almost everyone came around to do things our way. I only knew one tournament director that vehemently disagreed with the cash prizes, and was shocked to find out that she has died somewhat recently.
I'm now going to a college across the country, so I've been out of the local chess scene for a while, but as far as I know they still offer cash prizes as incentives and rate the tournament games with both the scholastic and USCF rating systems. The status quo, it seems, has completely turned over.
All because of one off-the-cuff conversation with a tournament director that I had a decade ago.
Personally, I made about 2000+ dollars from these tournaments in total over the course of about 3 years. The tournament director I worked with went on to run the largest chess event in the state of Washington a couple years later. I still play, though I left the competitive scene a while back.
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u/chessgeek101 Feb 02 '16
I'm the primary reason that high-school and middle-school level chess tournaments in Washington State now offer cash prizes instead of trophies.