English Chess Forum

Going back twenty years to the registration scheme, you had to have local agreements between clubs and counties as to which league was the main man. For example I had to agree with the Berks Registration Sec that Bourne End players would always be registered with Bucks. The Thames Valley league being non-territorial (in the county sense) could freeload on the back of registrations through Bucks, Berks, Surrey and Middlesex. None of this helps with players who are members of more than one club. As no-one knew apart from the local registration officers who was registered and who wasn't, any attempts by the BCF to enforce a membership closed shop were doomed to failure. And just as well, because the Fischer boom could never have happened under compulsory or universal membership. The BCF's old scheme worked on calendar years from Jan 1st , so you could get the season under way before worrying about who was or wasn't going to be registered.

I'm not sure I fully understand this post, but I was rather assuming that having 1000 or so clubs liaising direct with the ECF office was undesirable. 40 or 50 MO's (whether leagues, counties, unions or congresses) would have been simpler I would have thought.

I thought the premise of membership was that you have 10,000 or more individual players liaising directly with the ECF office. The premise of Game Fee was that you have a limited number of organisations liaising with the ECF office. According to Andrew Farthing, the individual route is cheaper.

If you don't do this, you have just replaced indirect membership with payments calculated by event with indirect membership with payments calculated per head.

But it goes back to one of Adam's unanswered questions



or even the unasked question

To date, I've only heard Adam Raoof suggest this, perhaps because it would be utterly bonkers. You'd need a small army in the office, but only for a few weeks of the year.

One of the premises of membership is that the ECF can engage directly with 10,000 or so members - quite a different thing.

Andrew is of course working right now on the mechanics of how the membership should work and perhaps we should wait for his suggestions to be published. I'm sure that he will consider the operational difficulties of the various options.

Thanks. I know that. I also know why

Apparently I am bonkers too. I was under the impression we were all going to join online through an automated system. I'm not sure why anyone needs to continue to liase with the office.

The idea of a hierarchy: player -> club -> county (league/ tournament) -> ECF , seems to me antiquated. The player gets separate services from them.

A county needs to check on membership status, to accrue game fee. (although I hope that is temporary, until membership is established). But I don't see why it would want the hassle of organising membership.

I really don't understand why the ECF should "engage" with 10,000 members without going through the pain of demanding money from them.

Given the bizarre nature of ECF decision making, perhaps it's not a shock that Council can vote 70-30 in favour of a membership scheme without having a clear idea as to whether the basic unit of membership is
(a) the individual
(b) the club
(c) the league/county or
(d) the Union

According to Andrew in the first paper, all individual membership options are cheaper to run than Game Fee. MOs are all very well, but require a competent volunteer in each local area not only to set the scheme up but also run it every future year. So there is a distinct cost involved, but not one that shows up in the ECF Accounts.



John Upham is always telling us of the wonders of the ETTA membership system for table tennis.

If that's the proposal, I've not seen it in any of the papers that I've read. I think Adam suggested this as a potential solution on this forum but we've identified now that he was not speaking for the ECF when he said it.

A county could abdicate all responsibility for membership and hope that players join up. Roger suggests that this is what Bucks have decided to do. But my bet is lots of players would forget, not know how to do so etc. Leicestershire for example would rather organise an MO so not to get hit with a potentially large game fee liability. But each to their own on that I suspect.

I probably used "we all" unclearly. I wasn't intending to suggest those with MO arrangements would be required to stop. But I think the "How will the membership fees be collected?" section of AF's Q&A is consistent with my understanding of how we are likely to run membership in areas where there are overlapping organisations.

It seems to me simpler for the county to require clubs playing in its competitions to organise membership, than to try to organise it for them. At the very simplest - if you play an unregistered player in a graded competition, the player defaults.

Alternatively, each club must pay £2 for every game by an unregistered player and pay the county at the end of the season. Although I'd think it simpler to insist on membership and let the club to work out how to subsidise new members. I think clubs are able to make better case by case judgements on these things than the county or ECF are able to make fully comprehensive rules.

On a point of fact Bucks has taken no further action in the light of the decisions taken at Council in October, though we will obviously be looking at the full range of options with varying degrees of enthusiasm. Roger may feel he is able to speak in an individual capacity or as an officer of a member club, but his views should not be taken as representing those of the county association, albeit that some officers sympathise with some but not all of the views expressed. I would like this distinction to be maintained as the discussion goes forward as a courtesy to other county members, as well as officers.

I would also make the same point regarding Berkshire and any other counties that Roger feels he might be speaking on behalf of (although I cannot speak for them! )

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Jonathan - Apologies if I misunderstood

which seemed to make it clear that Bucks and Berks had already decided not to run an MO.

That is of course an opinion. If volunteers came forward with a coherent plan as to how they were going to run MOs, it could be considered. At the next Berks Exec, we will have to discuss the usual three way option. (Yes/No/Don't Know).

Getting back to practical issues, if you are running a Congress in September or October, how do know anyone's membership status if it could listed or not in any one of forty MOs, which are variable in both their speed of collection and their reporting to the central membership database? This applies particularly if players enter the tournaments during August or earlier.

I rather think it's the ECF who have to hope players join up. With the abolition of Game Fee in its present form, no members equals no income to the ECF.

They will actually. Part of the voting in the October meeting was that all existing schemes will be terminated. That's not to say that they cannot be restarted. There's even small price differential, £ 13 through an MO (if later than 31st October) and £ 12 if you buy direct.


The evidence of the ECF's intention to offer membership directly to the playing public is taken from these paragraphs.





If the ECF has funding problems, I don't believe that MOs are any sort of solution. All they do are to lock the ECF into a volunteer expensive and volunteer vulnerable method of funding.