Chop Wood, Carry Water: Paperwork
In my first post for Intermezzo I mentioned that I want to try to compete in a rated tournament sometime this year.
As it turns out, “sometime this year” is in 25 days.
Benjamin and I had talked about entering a tournament together, and maybe also training together. I really liked the idea. I especially liked the idea of having a training buddy for at least my first tournament.
But that posed some scheduling challenges. Benjamin is going to be in Europe for much of May for his honeymoon, and when he and his wife Cat (also a close friend of mine) return they’ll be scrambling to move into a new apartment. Meanwhile, June and July are tricky for me because of the World Cup. So if we were going to do this, we either had to do it really soon or we’d have to wait until much later in the year.
We opted for sooner rather than later. And now we’ve both got April 15th circled on our calendar.
This is a beginner’s open tournament, eligible for U1200 and unrated players, with 5 rounds (Swiss System) played all in one day. G/30, 5sec delay. There’s no prize fund — everyone who plays gets a book, if you earn 4pts you get two books, and if you earn 4.5pts you get a book and a chess clock. These tournaments are mostly about two things: establishing a rating, and getting a feel for how these things work.
And for me personally, there’s a third thing: resolving a niggling question I’ve had since I was 10. For all that time that I was obsessed with chess as a kid, I never got to compete in an official rated tournament. I’ve been wondering ever since if I could hack it if I actually went to one. In a few weeks, I’m going to find out.
But first: paperwork.
There’s two things I need to enter the tournament. First is to pay the entry fee and register with the tournament organizers. Simple enough.
The second is to become a member of the USCF. You can’t play in officially sanctioned rated tournaments unless you have a US Chess member ID. You can show up without one, but they make you purchase membership at the registration desk, and if you don’t want to, they turn you away.
So, fair enough. I’m a bit short on money, so in order to cover the membership fee I had to sell an article. While I was waiting on that, I scoped out the membership form. I had a suspicion that the form would ask for my gender, and that it might be a problem. I was right.
I mean, look. I’m nonbinary. I live in a world that, for the most part, doesn’t acknowledge that I exist. I’ve become accustomed to these small bureaucratic oversights. I’m not upset, but I am disappointed, and I don’t think that’s an unreasonable reaction.
(I did find it funny that the membership form actually does have more than two options for gender identity, but that the extra ones were just terrible.)
Since I was going to have to wait a couple days to get paid anyway, I sent an email to US Chess’ member support office to ask if they’d be willing to consider offering more options for gender identity on their membership form. Or, failing that, if they’d be willing to change “Unknown/Not Available” to something like “Prefer Not To Say.”
This was the response I got.
Honestly, I’m pretty okay with this reply. I was expecting them to say something like, “we have no intentions of changing our policy at this time,” or something similarly curt and dismissive. So to hear them say, “we know this is a problem, we’re working on it, please be patient” is actually pretty encouraging! I can work with this!
In the meantime, I marked down “Unknown/Not Available” and finished my membership application. I want to do this tournament thing, and I want it enough to put up with a little cisnormativity.
So I did this.
And then I did this.
No turning back now!
So now that this is out of the way I can focus on training for the tournament. Which I suppose also means figuring out how to train for a tournament. I’ve never done this before! If I learned anything from five years in art school, it’s that process matters; that how I go about a thing is at least as important as the results. So a big part of my job here is figuring out the best way to train — learn how to learn, basically.
I’ll talk more about that in the next training blog.
