Rulings

One of the things that many TDs do during downtime at tournaments is to discuss rulings that occur. Partially, this is because we are nosy by nature, but I prefer to thing that we are trying to hone our craft. I was listening to some of the calls that came up to TDs at our recent IL K-8 Championships. Here are a few that came up.

1. Parent complains that the rating used was from the March supplement instead of the more up to date MSA rating. The parent is wrong for making this complaint! First, the ratings do not become "official" until they are part of a supplement. This gives time for the events to be submitted in a timely fashion, and allows for errors in the system such as wrong IDs being submitted to be corrected. Presumably the parent thought that they would gain some advantage in pairings or tiebreaks for their child. Truth is, a higher rating is irrelevent for getting better pairings or tiebreaks. They may end up with worse pairings or tiebreaks or it could even be neutral.

2.A coach alerted the TDs that teammates were paired in round 6, and that could potentially hurt the team score thus being unfair. It turned out that this was because 4 of the 5 perfect scores in that section were from the same school (a nice problem to have). Newsflash to the coach, if you have 4 players who are perfect going into round 6, you are probably going to win the team prize. This is still an individual game, and breaking scoregroup to pair all these players against kids from other teams is not fair to the kids in the other scoregroup.

3. Complaint that error in who won a game would not be corrected for the scores but only for rating purposes. Sometimes coaches or parents do not want to take responsibility for checking the standings after every round. This is very important because entry errors do happen (either by us TDs, or players). If a player who won a game, but was marked as a loss in round 2 comes up after round 7 finishes complaining that he was shorted a point, they are stuck. It would be unfair to others to allow this player to benefit by easier pairings for 5 rounds because they did not check out the standings.

4. This one was the most disturbing dispute from that weekend. On a top board in the 2nd-3rd grade section, a player shows up 5 minutes late with his father demanding the time being restored to the clock. The opponent calls for a TD as he should. After a heated argument with TDs, and both sets of parents, 2 of the 5 minutes are restored to the clock. This was an atrocious call on several levels. Why? First, there are plenty of reasons to keep the time off the clock since the player started the clock following the TDs instruction. There are even a few possible reasons to put all the time back on the clock, such as the player's game ended late and asked permission for a late start (I do not believe this was the case). There are no acceptable reasons to put some of the time back on the clock. This was a weak ruling by a TD aiming to please everyone. Now for the reason that the ruling was truly horrific:

The TD allowed a severe argument by adults to take place in front of a couple of 7 year olds. This is more likely to have an impact of the game than 2 or 5 minutes would have. The correct ruling, is to kick the parents or coaches butts off the floor explaining that spectators have no rights and that the TD will resolve it with the players. That way, no child gets intimidated by an angry screaming adult.

EDIT: For those of you reading that may check the MSA to see who the TD was in this case, let me say that it was not Colley Kitson who was listed as the section chief. Colley is too good a TD for that to happen under his watch.

Glenn