One of the challenges setting up this Championship has been the considerable discrepancy in membership between the groups. Here are a few tips what works based on my experience.

1. Harvest your "parent" groups.

The group that represents your area in the World League is Team US SouthCentral. So you go to http://www.chess.com/groups/view/team-usa-south-central and you see all members listed in the order they were most recently online. Scour the list for any links to Oklahoma. Open a second tab, go to your team home page - admin tools and select the "Invite People" options. Go back to tab 1 and copy and paste the names of the members of interest. It isn't a bad idea to have a quick look at their "Online Chess" profile prior to doing it. Nothing is gained by inviting someone to your group that times out every second game. No fun for your team nor for your opponent.

2. Scout the interactive member map

Not nearly as effective but still a tool to try out. Go to http://www.chess.com/map/players and zoom into the area of your State. Click the flag and then right click on the member (if you left click you have to rezoom the map after returning), open member info in new tab and scour for potential. Some folks only play Live Chess, so there is more hit and miss here. Still, if you have only 10 folks now and can find three more this way that's a 30% increase.

3. Others

- connections, word of mouth, old friends ....

Some things to the invitation. Sure you can use your generic profile info that defaults as the invitation. Chances are better, however, if you tailor the message a bit so in order not to sound like a computer generated message. If you send invitations out and you get a message back that member A does not accept group invites then do NOT send them an invitation via the "Send Message" feature. It is both against the Chess.com rules and not likely to be successful.

I hope you find this info useful and can make it work for you.

Team OKLAHOMA

Super Admins

Admins