Elite juniors-a proposal

[Leonard Barden]

In the thread on the European School Championship, Richard Bates and Roger de Coverly wrote:


Richard: is there any serious 'elite player' strategy and targets relating to this?

Roger: Leonard mentions the 1960s and 1970s, but a major difference then was the numbers of players of secondary school and university age. So the grass roots grew of their own accord without the BCF directly assisting.

Judging by the junior director’s report which Roger provides. the answer to Richard’s question is ‘No’. Roger is right that we had a larger pool of secondary school players in the 1970s, but we actually produced way too many GMs and IMs in the 1970s and 1980s for the size of the chess economy then This became especially true after the 1990 collapse of the USSR which led to greatly increased competition from ex-Soviets.

Now the chess economy has shrunk further, and it is hard for any GM/IM outside the 2600+ quintet of Adams, McShane, Short, Jones and Howell to make a reasonable living from play alone. But in a decade Adams and Short will be over-50s, McShane may remain in the City and Howell could decide to become just a part-time GM after university, so there is a need for a small number of new elite players.

Yang-Fan Zhou is 18-19, is close to 2500 strength, and will probably achieve his first GM norm at Big Slick a few hours from now, so he has a real chance for 2600. Our other best sub-19 elite prospects are Franklin, Sanders and Wadsworth, for all of whom 2450-2550 currently looks the probable ceiling barring a sizeable teenage quantum jump by Sanders and/or Wadsworth.

In 1972 Jim Slater offered an award of £5000 for the first English GM and £2000 for the next four to achieve the title. The number was defined (by me) because there were seven realistic candidates (Miles, Keene, Hartston, Stean, Nunn, Mestel and Speelman), who would know they all had a good practical chance but that there was also serious competition. The Slater awards were successful and broke psychological barriers for English talents, though they were also technically aided because in the 1970s many more titled and rated players emerged worldwide.

What I would like to see now are awards for English juniors who become IMs or GMs at an age when, judged by what is happening in other countries, it becomes realistic to hope to succeed in serious adult GM events.

I reckon that GM at 16 /IM at 14 £5000, GM at 17/IM at 15 £3000, GM at 18/IM at 16 £1000 would be about right. These are standards which top international prospects in strong nations do currently achieve. I should add I have read of several cases of such players where they didn’t have a regular coach but strengthened their game by internet play at ICC or Playchess. So I think in principle that an outstanding English talent could attain such targets.

The awards would be an immediate incentive to Sanders and Wadsworth, and would also target any parents of younger talents/ambitious players who wanted a more challenging target than being one of a large ‘England’ group at a junior competition in Europe.

Where would the money come from? Ideally from the Robinson Trust, but the trust already provides an annual award of around £2000 to a selected junior (formerly Howell, now I think Zhou) so probably wouldn’t give support for a theoretically open-ended concept.

I think the people to approach are players and ex-players who were part of the 1970s and 1980s generation and who have since been successful in business-Norwood, Mortazavi, Hennigan, Parker, Chapman to name a few.

They would not even need to put money up front, just to guarantee the awards if anybody achieved them. There could be a time limit of, say, five years, with option to renew.

Realistically, it is quite possible that the guarantors would not need to put up any money at all, for these are challenging targets which would demand a strong work ethic as well as considerable talent from any junior aspiring to them. At most, I would expect less than a handful of serious candidates for the awards.

There is no need for the ECF to be involved, and quite possibly it wouldn’t want to be. The administration required is not demanding but some widely respected person would have to handle it. I think Lawrence Cooper would be the obvious choice for the post.

So that’s the proposal. You can debate its exact terms, but I think this has to be the way forward to meet Richard’s valid point above.


I

[Matthew Turner]

Leonard's ideas are as always very interesting, but I actually suspect they might have remarkably little impact. Given the current costs of going to University, obtaining the sort of standards Leonard suggests could be worth many times the sort of awards Leonard is proposing.

http://www.utdallas.edu/chess/scholarships/

[Angus French]

I think the money figures would need to be much larger to provide a real incentive (and also to be equivalent to the 1972 amounts): say £50,000 for a GM at 16 or an IM at 14.

I wonder, wouldn't the situation for Miles, Keene, Hartston, Stean, Nunn, Mestel and Speelman in 1972 have been different: presumably they'd have been old enough to be self-motivated and able to decide how much of their time to devote to chess improvement? With under 18s, parents will have a large say.

I think it's an interesting idea though.

[Christopher Kreuzer]

What would "£5000 for the first English GM and £2000 for the next four to achieve the title" be in today's money (i.e. allowing for inflation)? And I've not checked the link Matthew provided, but what are those chess scholarships worth in terms of GBP, and what sort of players have been awarded those scholarships?

[Matthew Turner]

I guess that the top chess scholarships to Dallas would be worth about £50,000 (£30,000 in saved fees in England plus accommodation and books). You do have to want to go to the University of Dallas, but it looks pretty reasonable to me. Looking at the GDP deflator it appears that £5,000 in 1970 would be worth roughly 10 times as much today, so we could be talking about roughly similar amounts.

[Christopher Kreuzer]

I guess that the top chess scholarships to Dallas would be worth about £50,000 (£30,000 in saved fees in England plus accommodation and books). You do have to want to go to the University of Dallas, but it looks pretty reasonable to me. Looking at the GDP deflator it appears that £5,000 in 1970 would be worth roughly 10 times as much today, so we could be talking about roughly similar amounts.

Thanks. I know some schools (including yours) do secondary school level chess scholarships. Do other countries also do that?

[LawrenceCooper]

If the recent Big Slick event is anything to go by giving them tournament opportunities to play in may be of more value than cash incentives. Sadly, organisers like myself don't have an endless supply of money so funding from somewhere needs to be found to enable events like this to continue.

[Peter D Williams]

[quote="Leonard Barden"]

Yang-Fan Zhou is 18-19, is close to 2500 strength, and will probably achieve his first GM norm at Big Slick a few hours from now, so he has a real chance for 2600. Our other best sub-19 elite prospects are Franklin, Sanders and Wadsworth, for all of whom 2450-2550 currently looks the probable ceiling barring a sizeable teenage quantum jump by Sanders and/or Wadsworth.



What I would like to see now are awards for English juniors who become IMs or GMs at an age when, judged by what is happening in other countries, it becomes realistic to hope to succeed in serious adult GM events.

I reckon that GM at 16 /IM at 14 £5000, GM at 17/IM at 15 £3000, GM at 18/IM at 16 £1000 would be about right.Quote Barden

Your missing out a number of other rather good Chess Juniors A Merry i believe he just got an IM norm/Haria, Ravi is anther good junior M ,Harvey / Kirk, Ezra G /William Foo/ Victor Jones is rather good to I wonder what help is being given to them by the ECF and the Trust?

I doubt £5000 would be enough of a prize but every little helps.

Yang -Fan Zhou is our best hope to achieve at the highest level and i do hope he gets all the support he needs from the ECF to become a 2600 player.

[AustinElliott]

What would "£5000 for the first English GM and £2000 for the next four to achieve the title" be in today's money (i.e. allowing for inflation)? And I've not checked the link Matthew provided, but what are those chess scholarships worth in terms of GBP, and what sort of players have been awarded those scholarships?

You can find various 'historical value of money' calculators around the web; one for UK costings is here.

The calculator suggests that a rule of thumb inflation factor for lump sum value since 1972 is about ten-fold - so the current equivalents of the 'Slater Prizes' would be £ 50K (first) and £ 20K (next four). Interestingly £ 50K is not too far off the 'ballpark equivalent value' of a full chess scholarship at UT Dallas that Matthew Turner gave back up the thread.

BTW, UT Dallas is a high-class institution, at least in the world top 100 Univs by most estimates, so every bit as good as a Russell Group Univ in the UK. The annual charge there for tuition is c. US $ 30K, and in-dorm room & board would be c. US $ 10K pa, so a four-year "Chess 1" scholarship at UT Dallas is a seriously valuable prize to a US out-of-state student, worth around US $ 160-170 K in round terms.

[Jonathan Bryant]

Yang-Fan Zhou is 18-19, is close to 2500 strength, and will probably achieve his first GM norm at Big Slick a few hours from now ....

And so he did.


I like the proposal - although in my case that's just me volunteering somebody else to donate some money. Like others, though, I think the amounts would have to be significantly increased to be some kind of equivalent to the Slater prizes. It's not just inflation, the young folk seem to have many costs that those of us who are older didn't have to meet. £5k, for example, wouldn't make much of a dent in one year's worth of university education - something I got for better than free and the guys who became GMs in the 1970s would have had it even better than my age group. And there's also the increased cost of cost of housing now etc etc


Im sure there'd be a publicity side-benefit too, though, if it did come to pass. RDK getting his first norm - and halfway to the big money - generated a report in the Daily Express for example (Chess Man Raymond Plays for Cheque - "If I get the £5,000 I shall throw a huge international party for all my chess friends across the world.”)