As far as I can tell, there’s no Chess club that meets regularly where I am. (Indianapolis, surprisingly enough. There’s “circlecitychess.org” but it appears they are defunct; no emails to anyone listed under “contacts” or to “info@” seem to go through.)
The only way I know of to get a rated game is to play a game designated as “rated” with another member of the USCF. As far as I know, this basically happens at club meetings and at tournaments. But with no club here, I don’t know how I can fulfill any of those conditions without travelling to Bloomington or Chicago or something. (I assume there’s a club in Bloomington what with it being a college town and all…)
So… I’m kind of interested in having an “official” rating which I update every few months or so. Is there a way to play rated games online perhaps?
Don’t you just go to a USCF tournament ? Here the list for indiana from the USCF site:
http://www.uschess.org/tla/yState.php?st=IN
I don’t know, but as it seems that, Al Michaels’s claim notwithstanding, Indianapolis is in fact NOT the largest US city that is not on a navigavble waterway (Dallas and Phoenix are both bigger and their waterways are not navigable year-round, at any rate), this may be a second chance for it to claim some sort of distinction.
Also, Pawn to King’s four, but my USCF membership is long lapsed.
It can be hard to find tournaments (well, they are all listed online, see jacobsta811’s post). But there are too few tournaments, and they are often not conveniently located. Alas, my USCF membership is long lapsed as well.
That’s exactly the kind of thing I was looking for. I don’t know why I didn’t see that when I went looking myself. Thanks for the link.
You can certainly play rated games on-line, but I don’t think it will be an “official” USCF rating. However, if you play enough games in which you perform reasonably consistently (say 20 or so), you will attain a rating that should convert accurately enough to an official USCF rating, if you want to compare your level with others.
The site I used many years ago is the ICC (Internet Chess Club), which at the time was the best in terms of the interface, number of players, and choice of different games/tournaments, but it was a pay site when I last used it (though you get a free trial). There are many others, some of which are entirely free, of variable quality. But I get the impression that you could have found all this by Googling, so maybe it was an official rating you had in mind. In this case, my first sentence of this post stands, AFAIK.