English Chess Forum

4. Will a player be able to ask the ECF to delete a historic grade more than 'n' years old so that he can start afresh? 4. This is not something we envisage. Organisers want the evidence for section limits. That's a good reason to delete historic grades of players who were last active before 2009, ...

Well what happens in league chess is that they play a few stronger people, you get a decent estimate and they're stuck on a realistic (if often slightly conservative) board. The strength of their teammates on either side is arguably more useful data than their opposition but using that would be sli...

While I must congratulate Tim on his appointment, surely it is a sad state of affairs that ECF was not able to appoint a woman to the role of Women's Recruitment Officer? Why? Is there a smaller, pinker and more expensive Women's ECF that only women are allowed to grant membership of? Do we have to...

I would ask the 200 how well his opponent played and provide an informal estimate of grade. Then you have to know whether the 200 is the kind who thinks every game they win a Herculean effort worthy of a candidates' tournament, or the kind who assigns everyone below 195 to the same "idiot" category.

I don't agree; I think the flaw in the logic is that it does not regard as significant the fact that this unknown X has played a game against a player graded 200 (which is *already* information about their strength, even prior to the result). i.e. the average grade among players who have played a g...

Hummm, I'm not sure you know. I think team captains tend to have a decent idea how strong players are, and that determines the strength of the field they play to a fair extent. Also people entering the 'right' part of Open tournaments. Seems like information to me. Weak, but information. Not got an...

I also think that all grading/rating systems struggle with 100 (or 0!) % scores. They don't have to. It's a German Tank Problem . If you capture a single tank, and its serial number is 60, estimate how many tanks have been manufactured? Since you only have one data point, the best assumption you ca...

Well, if people will try to commercialise an amateur game that no-one is interested in paying to watch, they'll end up presenting the Arthur Daley Trophy to the winner of the TrotterBrothers.com Open.

It's a downside of the perks of having a charity as part of your financial structure that you mostly lose control of the money in the charity. Similar problems have arisen from time to time with the John Robinson Trust where the ECF and the Trustees haven't seen eye to eye on what needed financing....

Reading it again, I'm also concerned by the contradiction between, on one hand, Tim's insistence that the post be in the gift of the ECF and not the Chess Trust, because the Chess Trust are just a conduit and the financial risk actually falls on the ECF. Other the other hand, Tim's repeated reassura...

Let me get this straight. You had a private chat with Mike Truran after the October 2018 meeting. Your interpretation of that chat was that he planned to stitch up both the job description and the appointment in your favour. But you only started having concerns about the fairness and transparency of...

to ensure that the ECF reaches out to involve many more women and girls in competitive and social chess at all levels . There you go again. Where do you think these organisers and captains are, who are waking up in the morning and deciding to exclude women from all levels of chess? I have never kno...

John Moore wrote: ↑

Sat Oct 12, 2019 8:58 pm

Is it me or does Carl Portman's stuff sound a lot like Charlie Storey. By the way, that is not necessarily a criticism.

It's better English, but there is the same note of menace. "My chess CV is bigger than yours, so you'll give me some respect or we can sort it out face to face."

I like Angus French. I've now renewed my Bronze membership, so I can say that as one of his constituents. Malcolm Pein's success in extracting money from sponsors (sorry, commercial partners ) seems to correlate directly with his success in extracting money from the ECF treasury. In fact, the spons...

...Finance Chairman: Now Malcolm, you spent £20,000 on international teams?... Ah, just to say that £45K was spent on sending two five-player teams to the 2018 Olympiad in Baku with £32K of that spent on fees made up of entry fees, travel fees, hotel fees and other fees including appearance fees. S...