Chess Clubs at Colleges

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I run a chess club at my college (which I just started this year...we have about 20 members already) and have a few questions for anyone who is in one/presides over one:

1. How often do you have tournaments? I'm thinking of upping our club's tournament count to four next semester (one per month)...is that too many or do you think that would go over well?

2. Any good books out there for beginning chess players? We have several who attend our club and I'd love to have a resource on hand they could consult.

3. Is there any good place to get economical chess sets? We currently have a few Pressman sets from the 1990s that the school had sitting around but we only have four (and usually are one short since some of our guys sign them out to practice with). I looked at Toys R Us, K-Mart, etc and can't find anything inexpensive enough for the likes of our activities director (or for our sake...we don't want someone to lose a piece from a $50 chess set).

4. Just a survey-type question to anyone who wants to answer it: when you play with clocks in your tourneys, how long do you give each side? (We do a maximum of 20 minutes per player but I've heard of some that only provide 10 or 15).

1. Never, so far, but I'm not in charge of it and it's a small club. One per month sounds great. Even more could be possible if you have such a large club, but one a month is pretty well balanced.

2. No. Don't waste money on books. Those players who do not learn from experience, will not learn at any other school.

3. THIS is the standard chess set, the only one I have ever seen at a real (USCF) tournament aside from the old guys who have the same thing in more expensive wood. It's cheaper if you can get it without the bag, and I believe there are also cheaper variations on that theme.

4. Those are blitz time controls. Real chess needs to be considerably slower. For an informal club setting, I'd still give at least 45 0 (45 minutes, 0 increment) though at a huge stretch I could settle for as low as 30 0. This is pushing it, though. When I'm in a tournament setting, I prefer long time controls, like 150/game or (some popular time controls in online tourneys) 60 60 or 45 45 (notated in X minutes plus Y seconds added after each move). I've never played a serious tournament at less than 30 minutes per player.

I'll run 30+ minutes past my VP and the other guys...we went with 20 since we start our tourneys at 1PM and none of us really wanted it to go until midnight since people have schoolwork, sports, etc.

Also, just out of curiosity, what is the male to female ratio at your club? Our advisor was really surprised that we have about a 5:3 ratio.

I suppose it depends on how many rounds you have, but any shorter than you've been doing is almost certainly too fast.

Male/female ratio... hm... I think we only have one girl, actually, and she's in charge of the chess club. Besides that, there's me and a handful of other guys. I suppose about 5 or 6 people total will show up consistently (others may come intermittently). So that makes about 4:1 ratio. But then it's a small sample size. In HS I remember there only being maybe 2 or 3 female players in the entire GMC, which was 5 boards per school for about 10 schools. In other words, chess is not an activity you sign up for looking to pick up girls...