English Chess Forum

"I change "bye" to "See Arbiter" on my printed pairings. A young junior with the bye came up to me and was worried that he had to play me. He'd obviously never seen me play. " A wise precaution (the first bit). There was a chap called "Bye" who kept winning by default in tournaments... I learnt my ...

NickFaulks wrote: ↑

Tue Apr 24, 2018 4:33 pm

I believe that club players in London would generally prefer the cost of membership not to go up this year

Won't they say that every year? I've never heard anyone who prefers a cost to go up.

Neil Graham wrote: ↑

Mon Apr 23, 2018 11:50 pm

The way I played I'm fairly certain that had the bye actually turned up, he would have beaten me!

I change "bye" to "See Arbiter" on my printed pairings. A young junior with the bye came up to me and was worried that he had to play me.

He'd obviously never seen me play.

Looking at a grading list of eligible players tells you nothing. It tells you how strong a team has the potential to be. A good captain, trying to run a successful team, would make use of this. Captains have come and captains have gone, and they've all made use of the resource to try to run a succe...

Which would be pretty distasteful behaviour even if having won a brilliancy. I'm not disagreeing, but in football or cricket it would be considered strange not to celebrate in this way. Could this be the definition of "sport" for which we have been searching? It depends though. If you were a bowler...

In WECU, EACU and the MCCU, the strongest team they can put out is eligible to play in the Minor. I'd be amazed if this claim was true for more than a very small number counties. You only need to look in the grading database for players who are listed as playing for their county chess associations ...

Some juniors are taught not to talk to their opponent during a game, or to move until their opponent has pressed the clock to avoid arguments about whose move it is and to slow their moving down. These things are not necessarily unreasonable things to teach juniors independently, but the behaviour q...

There were two reasons really. In the Midlands, it was to do with the fear of getting mushed in the Open. Not an unreasonable fear based on past performance. In WECU, EACU and the MCCU, the strongest team they can put out is eligible to play in the Minor. So why not enter it? That's what people do i...

This is me just coming up with ideas to reinvigorate the championship as a whole, like Alex H has been trying to do In the MCCU, counties don't enter the Under 180 at the start of the season. If any counties want nomination to the Under 180, they are invited to do so in January. Warwickshire entere...

Roger de Coverly wrote: ↑

Mon Apr 16, 2018 1:34 pm

Actually the Birmingham league might have been an exception.

That rule got removed from the book a few years ago.

Oh, it's already done by a volunteer? You're telling me that the UKCC and 4NCL pay money to you so that you can keep it and then instruct a volunteer to do some work? Something about that doesn't make sense. In terms of the financial cost: - The IRO is a member of staff at the ECF Office. So you mi...

The UK Chess Challenge and 4NCL are prepared to require the players who play in their events to have membership at the relevant level (or pay the appropriate surcharge), because in their belief the above tasks contribute positively to the success of their events. They understand that many of these ...

So tell me why, if I want to subscribe to an organisation that will use my money to promote chess, that organisation should be the ECF rather than the 4NCL or the UK Chess Challenge? The organisers of, respectively, the main adult tournament and the main kids' tournament? Why is it only the ECF tha...

I think I've concluded that seeding 128 players in a 128-player knockout doesn't work from a "fairness" perspective, with the possible caveat that it works if you re-seed after each round; so the highest remaining seed plays the lowest remaining seed in each round, a bit like the NFL playoffs. I se...

https://stacks.stanford.edu/file/druid:qk299yx6689/TV-thesis-final-augmented.pdf "For any n = 2^r ≥ 8, there exists a set of n players with a monotonic winning probability matrix P such that it is not possible to find an envy-free seeding S for the balanced knockout tournament between these n playe...