English Chess Forum

Do they expire? I always thought they did, but I happened to meet a chap the other day who had some year old norms made in Swiss tournaments and he seemed to think they were valid.

JustinHorton wrote:Do they expire? I always thought they did, but I happened to meet a chap the other day who had some year old norms made in Swiss tournaments and he seemed to think they were valid.

I believe the rules changed some time back. I expect it was an idea by you know who.

One or two British players revived old norms from the 1980s or earlier and got titles on the back of it.

from http://www.gibraltarchesscongress.com/g ... port4.html

John Saunders wrote:Perhaps there is a mini-trend starting, with Robert’s norm here and 60-year-old Jeff Horner’s clinching of his IM title at the last Monarch Assurance Isle of Man International some quarter of a century after getting his first two norms

Chris Beaumont became an IM courtesy of that rule change. (He had two IM norms in the 1980s and two in the late 1990s.)

That's right. The move was retrospective even, so IM norms which were thought to have died were resuscitated.

Howard Grist told me last year that anyone who has ever been over 2300 can now claim the FM title as soon as they have played a minimum number of games (something like 24). But there is no requirement that the applicant should still have been 2300+ by the end of those minimum number of games!

No doubt - though I am guessing here - this applies to anyone who once had a phantom 2300 rating, even if he loses it for good the following day and it is never published in any of the quarterly FIDE lists ...

As I told you all in another thread though (and I think this is what Roger is alluding to), applicants have to pay FIDE for their titles - out of their own pocket too, at least if they are English.

Thanks for this.

What this is about is that while at the tournament in Benasque that finished yesterday, my wife was driving me out of town towards our campsite when we picked up a hitch-hiker who was on a walking holiday: nothing to do with the tournament. Anyway, it turned out that by concidence he'd been a strong player on the English scene twenty years ago and he had a couple of IM norms from then that - he thought, apparently correctly - had become valid again.

So I thought I'd check it before writing it up for S&B.