Kings Place Chess Festival 15 June 2013

[John Upham]

you aren't going to be able to publish games because of the lack of score sheets.

Score sheets were provided as some players were using them so there was no lack.

Top boards were DGT sensory ones.

I doubt however, if the non-DGT scores have been input.

[Roger de Coverly]

and it would be nice if when you clicked them it opened in a graphical pgn reader!

You should do both. Collectors of pgn files will want them as a plain download. Equally those accessing them on a mobile or tablet might well have configured their device to open pgns automatically with a database, reader or playing program. Otherwise something that you just play through with on a browser.

[Martin Benjamin]

I am experimenting with Dropbox. Can everyone reading this see the crosstable for the Open in my public folder here? Moreover, does the link to the rnd_01.pgn files work?

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/253 ... index.html

Adam

I can read the crosstable. I am no expert on ratings or grades or "W-We", but the Tournament Performance Ratings look a bit odd to my untutored eye.

Compliments to you and your colleagues on your hard work. As always with a new venture, a couple of things to consider in terms of possible improvements, but a great success. I can rarely play at weekends, but the chance to play in a strong field in the Open tempted me to wangle a day's pass from family duties, and the number of entrants in all the sections is evidence of success. Thanks for putting it on.

[Adam Raoof]

I am experimenting with Dropbox. Can everyone reading this see the crosstable for the Open in my public folder here? Moreover, does the link to the rnd_01.pgn files work?

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/253 ... index.html

Adam

I can read the crosstable. I am no expert on ratings or grades or "W-We", but the Tournament Performance Ratings look a bit odd to my untutored eye.

Compliments to you and your colleagues on your hard work. As always with a new venture, a couple of things to consider in terms of possible improvements, but a great success. I can rarely play at weekends, but the chance to play in a strong field in the Open tempted me to wangle a day's pass from family duties, and the number of entrants in all the sections is evidence of success. Thanks for putting it on.

Thanks Martin - do feel free to email me with suggestions for improvements, and thanks for playing - it was a pleasure to see you there!

[Roger de Coverly]

I can read the crosstable. I am no expert on ratings or grades or "W-We", but the Tournament Performance Ratings look a bit odd to my untutored eye.

The pairing software they used expects the ratings used for rankings and thus pairings to be Elo ones and based its calculations on that. As they appear to have actually used ECF grades for the rankings, that's why they look wrong.

[Adam Raoof]

I have sorted the pgn files out so that they now work, and corrected Malcolm Pein's score.

[Sean Hewitt]

If you could halve the natural wastage (as you call it) you would increase the number of players playing the game, year on year. I would have thought that would be obvious.

I am using the term increase in players to mean that each year there are more players than the previous year. You can only do that by attracting new players. so if you start with 100 players and you lose 10 a year, your numbers go 100, 90, 80 etc. If you lose 5 a year it's 100, 95, 90 etc. That's more players than the first series but still a decline. If you want to increase the number of players in absolute terms, you have to recruit new ones.

As you appear to be mathematically challenged I'll set it out for you. We have a reasonably constant number of players in the grading system. If your wastage figure of 10-15% is right (and I think it is) then we must be already be attracting 10-15% new players per year.

Therefore, if we can reduce the rate of attrition whilst maintaining the rate of recruitment of new players then we will have more players playing chess.

You accept that membership encourages existing players to play more. The stats show that the more games someone plays in one year, the more likely they are to continue playing the next. Therefore, the membership scheme makes it more likely that players will continue playing chess and so we should see a long term increase in the numbers of players playing.

[PeterFarr]

I guess the next question is whether the membership scheme then has a negative or positive effect on new players. Intuitively, if its a barrier then it is more likely to be so for people that are already half-hearted about playing, and would be less likely to continue anyway?

Actually I wonder if too much emphasis is placed on the debate around membership as a driver or inhibitor of activity; doesn't the availability and promotion of attractive, well-run events such as Adam's evidently is, the 4NCL, e2e4 tournaments etc. have more impact on overall participation? - obviously together with the relative strength / attractiveness of local clubs and leagues.

Really, membership of the national body should be a side issue in relative terms shouldn't it?

[Roger de Coverly]

whilst maintaining the rate of recruitment of new players

And why do you suppose setting up financial and organisational barriers to inhibit new or returning players from taking part does this? At the highest price it's £ 28 for a single 4NCL game if you don't want your newly reactivated rating removed.

The junior organisations told the ECF Council that a £ 8 per head charge for a sampler tournament was too much as it also will be if the ECF try to impose it on the National Schools. One of the weakest areas of the ECF's player base is secondary schools. A promising attempt to promote this has been torpedoed by the ECF's compulsory membership obsession.

[Roger de Coverly]

You accept that membership encourages existing players to play more. The stats show that the more games someone plays in one year, the more likely they are to continue playing the next. Therefore, the membership scheme makes it more likely that players will continue playing chess and so we should see a long term increase in the numbers of players playing.

I think that compulsory membership forces existing players to play more because for the same number of matches you have fewer potential players. I would have thought the likely correlation on games v propensity to play the next season is that if you are contemplating retirement from competitive chess that you phase out by reducing commitments one season and retiring the next. If anything being handed a financial demand by the ECF on 1st September every year is likely to encourage drop outs.

With a membership scheme structured by calendar year, I would expect summer events attempting to attract players to their one and only Congress for the year may struggle. The £ 6 fee might be below the pain threshold, but the Bronze to Gold upgrade at £ 15 might not be.

[Sean Hewitt]

whilst maintaining the rate of recruitment of new players

And why do you suppose setting up financial and organisational barriers to inhibit new or returning players from taking part does this?

Because the evidence from MOs tells us that it doesn't.[/quote]

The junior organisations told the ECF Council that a £ 8 per head charge for a sampler tournament was too much.

They did indeed say that. However, where is the evidence? The answer of course is that there is none to support this hypothesis.

It's a shame that some junior organisers are unable to appreciate the long term benefits, but being change resistant is of course human nature. That said, I'm confident that in the light of some extremely positive conversations with a number of progressive junior organisers we'll be able to change that perception.

[Roger de Coverly]

Because the evidence from MOs tells us that it doesn't.

I don't see a vast number of new players in the North which has had membership structures for getting on for eight years. When it first came in, the estimate was that it was producing more in revenue than Game Fee. With no evidence of a rush of new players, that can only have been because it was collecting more from the existing ones. Indeed whilst the scheme was marketed on the basis of pay us membership to save your club Game Fee, it failed to note that for many players the cost of membership exceeded the savings on Game Fee.

It has to defy logic that a rule which says that you aren't allow to play chess unless a member of the ECF has any effect other than reducing the number of participants. I can see the effect at tournaments like the recent Sunningdale. Usually in weekend tournaments it's the lowest sections that have the largest entries, but in Sunningdale the bottom two sections had to be amalgamated. I'd speculate that the requirement to become a Gold member put people off. They would be paying a year's membership for the right to play in tournaments only to September.

However, where is the evidence?

The evidence is that they didn't want to run events under those rules. Remind us what the entry form for next season's National Schools is going to say. Will it really have the confidence to say that the entry fee is at least £ 8 for every player even if they only play one match?

[Michael Bennett]

I've imported the pgn files Adam has posted into Chess Microbase, so people can play through the games online.
(There's also an 'Export' button for those that would like to import the games into their own engine.)

http://chessmicrobase.com/m/rd0iwpy6

Congratulations to Adam and his whole team on an excellent new event!

[Sean Hewitt]

It has to defy logic that a rule which says that you aren't allow to play chess unless a member of the ECF has any effect other than reducing the number of participants.

It's called economics. Humans are not entirely logical creatures.

I can see the effect at tournaments like the recent Sunningdale. Usually in weekend tournaments it's the lowest sections that have the largest entries, but in Sunningdale the bottom two sections had to be amalgamated.

I too see the effect at tournaments like Sunningdale, which was the second largest tournament that we have run to date and required me to borrow some extra clocks from the good folks at Chess in Schools and Communities so that the event could take place. Like you, I blame the ECF membership scheme for this.

Merging the third and fourth sections was necessary because I tried to run an extra section and I got the grading boundaries badly wrong. We live and learn.

[Thomas Rendle]

I've written a report of this excellent event on my blog: http://www.chess.com/blog/Trendle/kings ... -in-london