NickFaulks wrote: ↑Sun Apr 15, 2018 12:14 am
Chris Goodall wrote: ↑Sun Apr 15, 2018 12:06 am
Presumably those payments to FIDE are the reason Gold membership is dearer than Silver, though?
Why not check the numbers? Then you wouldn't have to presume.
Hey, 12:14am, you managed a whole day without sulking at me.
Jonathan Rogers wrote: ↑Sun Apr 15, 2018 9:33 am
Roger de Coverly wrote: ↑Sat Apr 14, 2018 9:45 pm
Chris Goodall wrote: ↑Sat Apr 14, 2018 2:37 pm
What is actually the point of finishing 9th in an Olympiad? Is it prestige?
That's somewhat higher than the football team managed in recent events.
I think there was a thread once which compared the respective performances.There had been a longish run of Olympiad and European performances equivalent to not even qualifying or going out at the group stages.
Financing the national teams has a long history. It didn't use to involve tapping the membership as it was covered by sponsorship and grants from UK governments. That's in plural because the Welsh and Scottish devolved governments have also supported national chess teams.
I remember that back in the 1990s, John Nunn wrote to CHESS to correct a reader's misapprehension that BCF money was being spent on national teams, pointing out the existence of sponsorship and saying (reasonably enough) that unjustified criticism of the team did not help with retaining sponsors. But I don't remember him writing anything which would justify (effectively involuntary) sponsorship of the team by ordinary players.
Indeed, justifying the national teams' budgets by pointing at sponsors is the exception that proves the rule: if there weren't sponsors, it wouldn't be justified. John Nunn's article is an argument
against channeling money from the grassroots to the élite.
JustinHorton wrote: ↑Sun Apr 15, 2018 10:48 am
Still, the Olympiad is the biggest event in chess after the world championship, the England team are the ECF's representatives there and I for one would like us to put out a strong side if at all possible. Of course people might take a policy decision to choose younger players for the purpose of giving them experience, and that might well be a good strategy, but in general I understand that professional players need paying and that if we want to have them representing us, we need to put our hand in our collective pocket.
Three points, firstly if "professional players need paying", well, there are more professional players in England than can fit on an Olympiad team! The ECF, quite rightly, doesn't guarantee a yearly income for every G.M. Joe who decides to call him/herself a professional player. If the market doesn't demand your services, you're not a professional, and life goes on.
Secondly, when you say "our collective pocket", we don't have a collective pocket, this isn't 1920s Russia. The people who care about the Olympiad team have pockets, and the people who don't care about the Olympiad team have pockets. Clearly the carers' pockets aren't actually deep enough to fund the Olympiad team, or else you wouldn't be shaking down the non-carers to make up the shortfall. So when you say "if WE want to have them representing US" - WE don't want that, you want that.
Thirdly, we fund the men more than the women. Why is that? It's clearly easier to win the women's tournament, because the top teams' grades are lower. So why concentrate on the more difficult tournament? Is it intentional, or is it because when groups of men decide to intervene in a free market the results tend by magic to be better for men than for women?