Question for parents with kids who play in USCF and chesskid

Father of 2 young boys.  One of my kids, 6, only plays online for now on chesskid.com.  He got to a 1150 rating with some coaching.  He also has 1100 in puzzles.  I am thinking of getting him some live play at a tournament, but not sure which division to put him in.  Anyone know what UCSF rating range this would translate into?  I am UCSF B category player myself (back in HS), so not sure how breakdown below 1000 would work.

Start in the lowest section so he can build confidence.

The more games he wins the more likely he is to retain interest and keep playing.

Check with the organizers.  They may require unrateds to play only in the U300 division or the championship division.  Or they may have their own conversion formula from on-line ratings and thus know the best division (or at least the one that doesn't have one or two of the other parents lambasting you for entering your your kid in a too-weak division against their kids).  If that 1150 rating is established enough to no longer have 30+ point swings for wins or losses then U800 may be the lowest division you'd want to consider.

Emphasize that the games are for your kids' enjoyment, accept that in their first tournament your kids might be overwhelmed by the experience and not win all of their games.  The physical chessboards will not prevent illegal moves so tell your kids they may have to call over an arbiter/director if their opponents accidentally make one (at that age level a mistake is much, much more likely than doing it deliberately).  Practice playing with a physical chess clock.

At that age keeping score (writing down the moves) may be required (well, probably not for the 6-year-old but maybe for the possibly older one that you didn't give an age for), so practice that as well.

PS At the Dallas National Elementary there were kids from Washington State that had ratings in their regional system that were significantly higher than their US Chess ratings (the regional system had a floor of 400 versus the US Chess floor of 100) and they went into sections based on those US Chess ratings.  Most local tournaments for kids are fairly friendly but the nationals have some hyper-paranoid parents and in Dallas they checked out those ratings, didn't realize they were inflated, and berated the Washington kids while seating their own kids before the next round started.

Finally, for some kids the age of the opponents is more significant than the rating.  A first grader in a kindergarten to second grade U1000 section may be more comfortable (and score better) then if playing in a kindergarten to sixth grade U600 section.

Appreciate all the comments.  On advice from TD, we'll start at a lower division for his first tourney experience.  

One last point.

It has been said there are four types of chess parents.  At the moment you might be in group 1 or 3 since you've already demonstrated that you will ask questions and thus are not in group 2.

1)  Those that know what is happening and understand how things go.  These are easy for a TD (arbiter for the non-USA readers) to deal with.

2)  Those that don't know what is happening, don't ask any questions, get frustrated, and never come to another tournament.  These are easy for a TD to deal with because they are essentially invisible.  I do a lot of scholastic tournaments and enjoy the happiness I see in the kids and parents, so I do not want any parents to remain in this group.

3)  Those that don't know what is happening and ask a lot of questions trying to understand.  It can be a bit of a pain for a TD to have to take time answering the questions of an ignorant person (the term ignorant is based on the original definition of "lacking knowledge" since such parents may be insistent but they are not being rude).  Because of that pain some TDs prefer to brush off such questions and essentially force those parents into the second group.

More experienced TDs will cherish such questions and will answer them (sometimes after a slight delay to avoid disrupting the smooth running of the tournament).  Experience has shown the great majority of such parents are quite willing to pass on their knowledge to other new parents and thus in the long run they save the TD a lot more time intercepting questions than the TD spent answering theirs in the first place.

4)  Parents who refuse to listen to explanations of what happens in a tournament or parents who want to twist anything they can to their kids' advantage (I know those are two different groups but even their combined numbers are so small that the readily fit into one group).