Professionals "turned away"

[Neil Graham]

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe- ... y-20008420

[Sean Hewitt]

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe- ... y-20008420

What a bizarre story.

[Ray Sayers]

Just means it is full I guess. Non-story.

[Sean Hewitt]

Just means it is full I guess. Non-story.

I rather thought it meant-

Professional Player : "May I have some conditions to play in your tournament."
Organiser : "Sorry, we have no money left for that. We have allocated all of our conditions already."
Professional Player : "Ok. Maybe next year."

Happens at every tournament I run!

[Kevin Thurlow]

I think Sean is right. As it happened, one GM dropped out fairly late and was replaced by another one who had asked to play.

[Ray Sayers]

Fair enough

I would love to play there but I heard it fills up quick so you have to enter early. I have never yet persuaded my wife of the benefits of a 'chess holiday'!

[Neil Graham]

Just means it is full I guess. Non-story.

I rather thought it meant-

Professional Player : "May I have some conditions to play in your tournament."
Organiser : "Sorry, we have no money left for that. We have allocated all of our conditions already."
Professional Player : "Ok. Maybe next year."

Happens at every tournament I run!

Which reminds me of an event elsewhere................

[Phone rings]
Organiser : "Hello?"
Voice : " It's ******** ***********."
Organiser : "Yes."
Voice : " Are you still accepting entries to the ******************?"
Organiser : "Yes"
Voice : " As you no doubt know, I'm a grandmaster. Is there appearance money?"
Organiser : "Yes. If you appear, you pay us money as in the entry fee."

Unsurprisingly Grandmaster ********** *********** didn't play in the event.

The names have been removed to protect the innocent; the number of *******s in no way reflect the identity of the tournament or the GM involved!

[David Sedgwick]

Reverting to the Guernsey International Chess Festival, Sean and Kevin are correct.

Peter Rowe, Guernsey Chess Federation President, mentioned in a radio interview that the GCF had not been able to offer conditions to all GMs who had sought them. Clearly this got somewhat garbled on the BBC website.

The Open Tournament at the Festival is just that - an open tournament. The GCF have asked me to make clear that they would not turn a player away from it. This year one player entered only on the morning of the first round. As it happened, he was the sole player from outside Europe and he received a special prize for the player travelling the longest distance to the Festival.

[David Robertson]

There was one professional I didn't turn away.

We were two days away from the kick-off, in 2008, of the 4th EU Championship in Liverpool. That morning, I received a phone call from a rather sheepish Etienne Bacrot. Was it too late to enter the tournament? Well, no it wasn't too late, I explained - and thinking quickly, hoped it would never be 'too late' to welcome another 2700 GM and French champion.

But...and I awaited Etienne's next inevitable questions: conditions? appearance fee? Alas, mon garcon, we have no money left; committed it all, and then some. Nothing. Nada. Rien. There was a pause at the other end of the line. Then Etienne said: "OK, I'll pay my own travel if you can give me conditions. And make me an offer on a fee".

Awkward. There really was no money left. I'd already run the budget to the edge, stripping out all reserves to pay the players we already had. But Etienne Bacrot was far too big a prize to turn away if it could be avoided. So what to do? Idly, for want of something to say while I thought, I punted him a figure - a sum well below his 'pay grade', but not a sum to insult him; hence a significant number. Nonetheless, I expected him to decline. To my surprise, he 'accepted'. If I could do that number, he'd be on the next plane.

Now I was on the spot. There was no money left, period. So I needed to find an alternative source of cash: some mug to bail us out; someone who loved the game, with more money than sense, who might just help. Happily that didn't prove too hard to find. And Etienne Bacrot arrived next day

[Patrick McGovern]

have never yet persuaded my wife of the benefits of a 'chess holiday'!

I tell my wife it's not a holiday it's business, difficult to explain the tan when I come back from Benidorm every December

[Stewart Reuben]

When I last ran Gibraltar there were about 250 applicants just for free accommodation breakfast and evening meal. There were 25 rooms available for such hospitality.
I first raised the matter of lack of space at the Caleta Hotel when I first saw the venue in 2002. The hoteliers probably thought I was being absurd. This year Stuart Conquest just about managed to fit everybody into the Open. Our fear grows bigger every year that somebody will turn up just before the first round from somewhere like Australia and there be genuinely be no space to accept them.
One Gibraltar four Moroccans turned up after having missed the first four rounds. But the 1980 Olympiad capped that with an entire team arriving just for the lat 5 rounds - there were 14 in those days.

In the late 1970s at the National Bank of Dubai Evening Standard London Congress I relied on people taking half point byes to fit them all into the venue at what was then the Cunard International Hotel. There were always enough withdrawals before the last round to make things work.
In 2008 for the British Championships in Liverpool I hired an extra hall well before the event. The main hall clearly wasn't going to be big enough.

Before the 1965 Islington Open there was no such concept as a penalty fee for late entries in UK chess. The British Championships simply didn't accept them.

[David Robertson]

In 2008 for the British Championships in Liverpool I hired an extra hall well before the event. The main hall clearly wasn't going to be big enough

Total bull**it. I've no idea - perhaps a psychiatrist has - why you propagate such nonsense. The hall - St George's Hall with its adjacent rooms - was plenty big enough. It was deemed appropriate, not by me, but by the then ECF official in charge, David Welch. No one but you ever suggested it was inappropriate or not "big enough". David Welch resigned his duties before the event, in the wake of disputes within the ECF Board, and you took over.

On assuming those duties, you deemed the space, hitherto deemed perfectly adequate, as 'inadequate'. You sought, and hired at additional cost outside the agreed contract, one additional room for your purposes. Not "an extra hall" at all, merely an extra room for administration within the main hall.

Let it be understood with absolute clarity: you hired no additional rooms of any kind for playing chess. There was no need. So why did you need to incur additional expense by hiring further space beyond that signed off by David Welch? Again, a psychiatrist might have the answer because I don't. One answer, available at the time, may serve in the absence of anything better: you needed an extra room to accommodate your preposterous self-importance.

Oh please, I beg you - do take me up on the matter!

[Sean Hewitt]

It was deemed appropriate, not by me, but by the then ECF official in charge, David Welch. No one but you ever suggested it was inappropriate or not "big enough". David Welch resigned his duties before the event, in the wake of disputes within the ECF Board, and you took over.

Previously, it was said that
1 - David Welch resigned due to ill health
2 - David Welch had not signed the contract for St George's Hall.
I can't speak to the veracity of either of the above, but appears to be in conflict with what you've now written.

[Alex McFarlane]

David's health was certainly a major factor in his decision to stand down as Manager at Liverpool. I do not know how much of an influence ECF 'politicking' was on his decision.

I am not privvy to all the behind the scenes activities but have heard at least two sides to many of the comments made regarding that event (in some cases three versions of events).

I thought that the additional room/hall that Stewart required was used for the U8 and U9 events.

The St George's Hall was a magnificent arena for the event but it was far from ideal. No venue is ever perfect. From an arbiter's point of view the main problem at Liverpool was the lighting which had to be enhanced and therefore the curtained windows, which required a considerable walk to open and close, were constantly monitored. This meant that the weather had to be predicted rather than acted upon which is never satisfactory.

[IM Jack Rudd]

David's health was certainly a major factor in his decision to stand down as Manager at Liverpool. I do not know how much of an influence ECF 'politicking' was on his decision.

It's the sort of thing that's difficult to untangle, because if David is anything like me, the politicking probably had a bad effect on his health.