ECF Funding

[Roger de Coverly]

Because leagues have to guess their Game Fee in October, 6 months before the end of the season. It's impossible to give the correct figure,

That's true of course, but once you've established the fixture list, you know how many games are going to be played barring defaults, withdrawals and conceded matches. Wouldn't a system of basing the October payment on the expected number of games (or a percent thereof) work rather better?

[Alex Holowczak]

Because leagues have to guess their Game Fee in October, 6 months before the end of the season. It's impossible to give the correct figure,

That's true of course, but once you've established the fixture list, you know how many games are going to be played barring defaults, withdrawals and conceded matches. Wouldn't a system of basing the October payment on the expected number of games (or a percent thereof) work rather better?

The reason it is as it is, I gather, is due to cashflow. That's probably the only thing stopping the sensible idea of paying at the end of the season.

At the moment, the 2010/11 Game Fee for leagues is paid in October 2010. If we switched to the end of the season, the Game Fee for 2011/12 would come in in something like June 2012. There'd need to be an interim payment of some kind, but I doubt leagues could be convinced to pay their Game Fee twice.

There are other things that may cause variances from the expected number of games:
(1) Defaults (as you say)
(2) League individual competitions (which may have replays if drawn)
(3) Trophies
(4) Playoffs for promotion/relegation
(5) Other non-league friendly games played that are lumped in for convenience

[Roger de Coverly]

At the moment, the 2010/11 Game Fee for leagues is paid in October 2010. If we switched to the end of the season, the Game Fee for 2011/12 would come in in something like June 2012. There'd need to be an interim payment of some kind, but I doubt leagues could be convinced to pay their Game Fee twice.

I must admit that the way I thought it worked or was supposed to work is that the October payment is an interim one, a payment on account as it were. The actual payment is worked out at the end of the season based on the graded game count. The difference between this and the payment on account is either settled immediately or carried forward to the settlement at the start of the following season. Not so different from those of us who do personal tax returns

I'm not sure that making two payments is a major problem for leagues. It does have the merit of cleaning the books of prior year accruals in time for a summer AGM.

[Michele Clack]

Although in many ways a membership scheme is the cleanest option, so to speak, I suspect it would discriminate against league chess as opposed to congress chess. A lot of the backbone players in clubs play perhaps a dozen graded games at most. I just can't see that charging them £18 per person before they sit down to play is going to do anything other than push a lot more than 15% of club players out of graded chess altogether. Where does that leave the clubs? In a mess with many closing down I suspect. Then you could get situations where there aren't enough teams in an area to run a league and you could get a domino effect. It could even spell the end of club chess in many areas. That would be a huge shame.

[Brendan O'Gorman]

Although in many ways a membership scheme is the cleanest option, so to speak, I suspect it would discriminate against league chess as opposed to congress chess. A lot of the backbone players in clubs play perhaps a dozen graded games at most. I just can't see that charging them £18 per person before they sit down to play is going to do anything other than push a lot more than 15% of club players out of graded chess altogether. Where does that leave the clubs? In a mess with many closing down I suspect. Then you could get situations where there aren't enough teams in an area to run a league and you could get a domino effect. It could even spell the end of club chess in many areas. That would be a huge shame.

Must say that this chimes with my reaction to the membership proposal. I am chairman of a club with a majority of members that play about 10-15 games of league chess each year. The club receives a subsidy from the employer's sports and social association, so the membership subscription is a mere £10. Most members have never heard of the ECF or game fee. I am daunted by the prospect of persuading them to shell out £18 to become members of an organisation whose main (only?) benefit to them is the grading system, especially when they realise that that system is pretty much what they have been paying for previously (albeit without realising the fact).

[Roger de Coverly]

A lot of the backbone players in clubs play perhaps a dozen graded games at most. I just can't see that charging them £18 per person before they sit down to play is going to do anything other than push a lot more than 15% of club players out of graded chess altogether. Where does that leave the clubs? In a mess with many closing down I suspect. Then you could get situations where there aren't enough teams in an area to run a league and you could get a domino effect. It could even spell the end of club chess in many areas. That would be a huge shame.

I rather see it as a choice between a quick death and a slow death.

Quick death is where insufficient numbers are prepared to pay the new prices and you make it a condition of play that they do. You don't have enough people to make clubs viable and enough clubs to make leagues viable.

Slow death is the same but you allow continued play as ungraded games. Presuming people are looking for graded games, league chess loses attraction because so many of the games are ungraded. You could also try slow death by opting out of the ECF altogether.

Still if you reduced English chess down to a bedrock of a couple of thousand, you might not need fifty people to run the ECF.

The ECF is an organisation comprising almost exclusively volunteers – more than 50 in all – along with three paid staff in its office in Battle, Sussex and a small handful of officials, such as the Grading Administrator, who receive an honorarium for the extensive work done on behalf of the ECF

[Eoin Devane]

I largely agree with what has been said by Michele Clack, Brendan O'Gorman and Roger de Coverly. I think, as was briefly touched on earlier, that the situation under Option 1 would be particularly severe for University clubs, owing to the fact that they (we) tend to have a rather large pool of relatively infrequent players. Though three games a year is so low a threshold that most of them would still come in above this. Trying to persuade people to go to Wantage on a Tuesday night is bad enough as it is; having to ask them to pay £18 for the privilege is something I dread to think about!

With the "Pay to Play" scheme, why does £1 go to the tournament organiser?

[Alex Holowczak]

Although in many ways a membership scheme is the cleanest option, so to speak, I suspect it would discriminate against league chess as opposed to congress chess. A lot of the backbone players in clubs play perhaps a dozen graded games at most. I just can't see that charging them £18 per person before they sit down to play is going to do anything other than push a lot more than 15% of club players out of graded chess altogether. Where does that leave the clubs? In a mess with many closing down I suspect. Then you could get situations where there aren't enough teams in an area to run a league and you could get a domino effect. It could even spell the end of club chess in many areas. That would be a huge shame.

I'm not sure people would notice much difference.

Redditch, for example, has 25 members or so (?). You play in the Worcester County League, Worcester & District League and the Birmingham League. So you benefit from massive reductions in team entry fees for all of those things. To field 7 teams in those three competitions, the total entry fee for them all under membership would probably not exceed £100. So your 30 members have to pay a grand total of £4 to make sure they're all covered. So that makes a total subscription of £18 + £4 + room (suppose free; this is a constant in all calculations anyway) = £22.

At the moment, your team entry fees might be somewhere in the region of £300, meaning each player has to pay £12 to cover the cost of entry fees, so your subscription would be £12.

Under option 2 of the proposed changes, Game Fee goes up to 60p though (at least), an increase of 10% or thereabouts. So you instead pay £330 in team entry fees. The cost goes up to £14.
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So the Membership option is more expensive, but what do you get for that extra £8? All entry to congresses will become £2-3 cheaper than they are now. So players will save money every time they turn up at a congress. So if some of your players play in 3 congresses a year - a few of which do at Redditch - then it's actually cheaper for them than it is now. County chess will get cheaper, because the entry fee for that will decrease and the MCCU won't need to pay any Game Fee. So the County Association (in Worcs. case) could reduce the entry fees still further for its league. So you save money that way.

In the experience of people who administer MOs now, they report on an increase in chess activity, as people are eager to get value for money from their membership.

It's important to realise the benefits of the Membership, rather than just the headline figure that is an increase in price.

If you explain all of this to your clubmates, what do you think the reaction would be? You'd have to explain that their annual subscription would go up by up to £10, but you'd get all these extra benefits in return.

[Alex Holowczak]

I largely agree with what has been said by Michele Clack, Brendan O'Gorman and Roger de Coverly. I think, as was briefly touched on earlier, that the situation under Option 1 would be particularly severe for University clubs, owing to the fact that they (we) tend to have a rather large pool of relatively infrequent players. Though three games a year is so low a threshold that most of them would still come in above this. Trying to persuade people to go to Wantage on a Tuesday night is bad enough as it is; having to ask them to pay £18 for the privilege is something I dread to think about!

With the "Pay to Play" scheme, why does £1 go to the tournament organiser?

Eoin, could this be incorporated into the way Oxford University pays its membership fee? I know you have £25 for life membership; if you had an annual subscription which included the price of membership in it - noting that entry to the league would be less - what impact would it have?

[Roger de Coverly]

With the "Pay to Play" scheme, why does £1 go to the tournament organiser?

I'm not sure I see the point either. Surely the ECF just bills the tournament a fiver for every non ECF member taking part. Some tournaments might wish to do as Hastings (and the ECF itself in the British for the Major Open and other non championship events) and not differentiate its entry fees between ECF members and the rest. Hastings Masters is where, like the 4NCL, you need to be an ECF member if you have ENG as your designation but you don't get any entry fee discount against non ENG players. In those circumstances the organisers just have to absorb the non member grading fee into the overall expenses of the event.

I suppose what the paper is proposing is that the entry fee for non-members should always be £ 6 higher than for members. What would be the position for titled players offered free entry?

I believe, but I don't know, that Hastings, Gibraltar, the London Chess Classic and other international events just pay Game Fee on players who are both non-ENG and non ECF members. Some non-ENG players are already members of the ECF.

In its way, the premise that membership lasting the duration of an event is a necessary feature is a welcome admission. There didn't seem to be any such concession in the Regan proposals of a few years ago.

[Eoin Devane]

Students don't like parting with money! With clubs like ours, it's hard to determine what the effect would be on league costs, because while we have more players than average for our teams, we also have more foreign and "new" players.

There is then another issue with your suggestion Alex, namely what to do about players who are already active players and so are members already. We'd have to be charging different people different rates, which I'm not sure I like. And this is not even mentioning those people who take issue with having to obviously subsidise ECF memberships when they themselves have no interest in playing anything but social chess ...

[Roger de Coverly]

Eoin, could this be incorporated into the way Oxford University pays its membership fee? I know you have £25 for life membership; if you had an annual subscription which included the price of membership in it - noting that entry to the league would be less - what impact would it have?

If it works the same way as when I was at university, "life" just meant for the duration of your university career. It was a fairly common way for university clubs and societies to be financed so that you had a one year rate and a "life" rate which was usually priced at about two and half years worth. There was a perception that the funding method relied on signing up people for the "life" rate at the Societies' fair who then lost interest after a term and didn't cost you anything.

You cannot pay £18 *3 or *4 out of a single payment of £25. Presumably at the moment, the County Chess Association just charge the University club the appropriate contribution to the League's Game Fee plus a bit. So five to eight pounds per board per season regardless of how many different bodies occupy the slot.

[Alex Holowczak]

Students don't like parting with money! With clubs like ours, it's hard to determine what the effect would be on league costs, because while we have more players than average for our teams, we also have more foreign and "new" players.

There is then another issue with your suggestion Alex, namely what to do about players who are already active players and so are members already. We'd have to be charging different people different rates, which I'm not sure I like. And this is not even mentioning those people who take issue with having to obviously subsidise ECF memberships when they themselves have no interest in playing anything but social chess ...

I can understand this. The picture I am getting from University people who care about this issue - myself included - is that they like the idea of Membership, but in the University environment, it won't work. With different hats on, we'd probably think differently.

[Eoin Devane]

You cannot pay £18 *3 or *4 out of a single payment of £25. Presumably at the moment, the County Chess Association just charge the University club the appropriate contribution to the League's Game Fee plus a bit. So five to eight pounds per board per season regardless of how many different bodies occupy the slot.

I think that's right. So we currently pay per game, but under the proposal we would have to pay per player.

[Alex Holowczak]

If it works the same way as when I was at university, "life" just meant for the duration of your university career. It was a fairly common way for university clubs and societies to be financed so that you had a one year rate and a "life" rate which was usually priced at about two and half years worth. There was a perception that the funding method relied on signing up people for the "life" rate at the Societies' fair who then lost interest after a term and didn't cost you anything.

I can see what you mean, although you mean the clubs' fair, given BUCS recognise chess as a sport.

Aston never charged a life rate. Perhaps I missed a trick...