When you organise a club event you can have the results ECF, rated provided that the event complies with the minimum standards for rating and you provide the results to the ECF rating team in one of the standard submissions formats.
Minimum standards for rating
Any OTB event can be rated in the Standardplay or Rapidplay list, so long as it is played with clocks – at least 10 minutes each – under ECF competition rules (quickplay finishes, adjournments, Fischer timings and even adjudication). Rapidplay is any event of more than 10 minutes and less than 1 hour for each player. Standardplay is more than and hour on the clock. In all cases the clock time is calculated as the minimum time plus 60 moves worth of increments.
The full rules for having a rated tournament can be found here – https://www.englishchess.org.uk/ecf-tournament-rules/
Club internal championships, large or small, are very rateable. There is one proviso – events, or sections of events, are rated whole or not at all. Results are accepted from organisers, not from individual players.
Managing clubs, events and fixtures
The easiest way of running a club event is to use the ECF’s League Management system, which supports both league and club events. You can access the ECF’s LMS system at the link here – https://ecflms.org.uk/lms/
New users will need to register an account via the contact link here – https://ecflms.org.uk/lms/contact
Help for individual events is here – http://ecflms.org.uk/lms/help/league_chess/orgclub?popup=1
You should then look through the LMS help pages which are comprehensive and should answer any questions about how the system works and how you set up and run club competitions. IF you are still unsure about what to do having registered and looked through the help pages do please use the contact form to ask any questions and we will get back to you with some answers.
The LMS system owner has also produced a couple of helpful Youtube Videos with information on how to register on LMS and run a club event, and how to setup a league —
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=waCCz_j53Kk | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ag-gxfck8Q
Setting up an event is fairly straight forward. You will first want to make sure your club (or league) is registered in the LMS system and that you have an LMS login and are registered as a owner of the relevant LMS organisation (i.e. the club or league). Existing owners can add new owners.
You can then define the event you wish to run for your club or league, create a list of players who will be taking part from the list of ECF recognised players, and then setup the fixtures within an event – eg rounds within a club competition or league fixtures with team matches.
Rating your events
Set the event to auto-rating where the results will be submitted to the rating system on 7th , 14th, 21st and 28th of the month. You can also press a button to submit results whenever you want.
You should enter results regularly as your competition progresses and your players will see their ratings change as the results are recorded in the LMS system and transferred automatically to the ECF rating system.
Each time the LMS submits results to the rating system, the rating system sends back an email to the person specified as grader indicating if the submission was successful. One possible error is that new players must have a club specified.
LMS supports both over-the-board and online events, which are rated in different lists. The over-the-board lists are updated as events are submitted from LMS with the results appearing in the players active ratings (which can be found by accessing a players rating audit with a record of the latest games played). Official ratings are then published monthly on the first of the month with any revisions made as a result of corrections to results.
Online ratings are calculated separately once a month based on results to the end of the preceding month, and published around the 15th of the month. Both sets of ratings are shown on a players record in the ECF rating system which can be found here – https://www.ecfrating.org.uk/v2/new/list_players.php