English Chess Forum

Jonathan Grant needs a draw for an IM norm and his opponent needs a win for a GM norm so that should make for an interesting clash.

Hjorvar's a GM Unfortunately Jonathan lost today

Top English team! Wtf is Rogers gloating??

John Cox wrote:Top English team! Wtf is Rogers gloating??

John, as your team captain I really would like you to use perfect grammar. It should be Rogers' with an apostrophe.

Top British team

I think my Club mates are teasing me. Too bad I can't be there to see them at the all-night dancing party which presumably starts at midnight .

Well done today, everyone.

Jonathan Rogers wrote:

Andrew Bak wrote:
Ihor Lewyk and Rich Archer had no intention of playing and just fancied a week away in Greece which is why they didn't pay the £100 each to register. FIDE's registration rules have ensured that seven players will have a day off they otherwise wouldn't have had!

It is only 55 Euros per person to register, so being prepared just to spend an extra £40 to register one player as a reserve would have enabled White Rose to play a full team throughout the event. It was a crass decision not to do so, and not much better to blame ECU regulations!

Not that the team could have been doing any better (matchpoint-wise) if it did have a full team. Their board two has been inspired and combined with highly favourable pairings they have done very well. (But the fact that their board two is on 4.5/6 and has no chance of a GM norm does say a lot about their pairings).

Jon,
If we had that sort of hindsight it would make us all better chess players.
Sadly as well as the 55 Euro registration fee there is also a non returnable 100 Euro bond to pay if you are not staying at an official venue. Myself and Mr Archer were staying in Rhodes town over a mile away and although we offered to pay whatever was required we could still not get a late registration. Paul Townsend argued our case with the organisers but it is still rather embarrassing and incredibly frustrating. Our opponents still had to show up for 3pm every afternoon to claim their point which meant that effectively they could not properly use the day to explore the island. We could only offer apologies. I don't think they would even allow us the option of playing a graded game at the venue should our opponents want it.

Apologies Ihor, I did come over as rather judgmental. I understand Andrew's earlier point better now, and much of the problem seems to be that they don't allow late registrations. There is no reason for that on their part, provided the late additions are eligible Club members. I wonder whether this rule has been introduced because in the past they had lots of problems with Clubs trying to field ineligible players at the last minute, in some cases even bringing them to the venue (Caruana in 2008, for example). But having a rule against late registrations was not the only way to stop that - insistence on eligibility should be enough! Their disproportionate rule is a real disincentive to enter if you have only six players who want to play.

Yorkshire team did quite well- but it was just annoying to see a defaulted board every game, especially in effect at the 'European Cup'. Hopefully measures are taken to ensure this never happens again.

Hi Mark,
We were so dissappointed to find that the organisers would be unmoved with their late registration policy no matter how much we pleaded and how much logic we tried to apply to the situation. A message that we would definately default a board was not even passed on to the first couple of teams by the organisers. So the man from Belarus had prepared to play and was not even given the chance of a relaxing first morning.
The squad have discussed measures to try to prevent this happening again but White Rose are the only English team to have been to the last 5 ECC events and this is the first time we have come up against a problem of this nature. An impeccable past record only to be thwarted this year by a very late illness in the camp by one of our most reliable players.

The no late registrations things is one thing. You can almost see it having been developed to counter some sort of top team messing around. Obviously you'd hope for some flexibility but you don't always get it.....

What does seem gently incredible/frankly baffling is not even letting you acknowledge the default in advance and give one of the opponents the time off/schedule the default to board 6 etc. That's just hurting the players from the team who isn't defaulting for no reason at all.

MartinCarpenter wrote: What does seem gently incredible/frankly baffling is not even letting you acknowledge the default in advance and give one of the opponents the time off/schedule the default to board 6 etc. That's just hurting the players from the team who isn't defaulting for no reason at all.

I don't know how far you want to pursue this, but it is quite typical of the anti-chess attitudes of some of those in senior positions in ECU and FIDE. The pursuit would be to make a formal approach to the ECF to mandate the ECF's representative (Nigel) to attempt to get the rules relaxed.

Roger de Coverly wrote:

MartinCarpenter wrote: What does seem gently incredible/frankly baffling is not even letting you acknowledge the default in advance and give one of the opponents the time off/schedule the default to board 6 etc. That's just hurting the players from the team who isn't defaulting for no reason at all.

I don't know how far you want to pursue this, but it is quite typical of the anti-chess attitudes of some of those in senior positions in ECU and FIDE. The pursuit would be to make a formal approach to the ECF to mandate the ECF's representative (Nigel) to attempt to get the rules relaxed.

If anyone does wish to follow this up, the time to do so is now - pretty much immediately. The Annual General Meeting of the ECU will take place during the forthcoming European Team Championships in Warsaw from 7th to 18th November.

Exactly. The fact is that far too many arbiters in general, and FIDE in particular, hate chess players and perceive that any opportunity to punish them must be seized.

It beggars belief not to have an option available to substitute for a player who is admitted to hospital at a late stage, but as we know FIDE is capable of any stupidity at all.

The zero tolerance nonsense made for a sad sight as well; everyone was sitting twiddling their thumbs for five minutes before each game. Boring, stressful, pointless. It must have gladdened the hearts of the arbiters to see their power over players made manifest so visibly, and of course it also meant that we all had to listen to their tedious announcements as well.

What steps exactly have Stewart and Nigel taken to get the ZTN revoked? Oh yes, I remember. Nigel's all for it because he couldn't beat some German 2500 giving 15-1 time odds.....

See the latest report on the ECC on the Yorkshire chess site.

http://yorkshirechess.org/white-rose-eu ... up-part-2/

John Cox wrote:Exactly. The fact is that far too many arbiters in general, and FIDE in particular, hate chess players and perceive that any opportunity to punish them must be seized.

It beggars belief not to have an option available to substitute for a player who is admitted to hospital at a late stage, but as we know FIDE is capable of any stupidity at all.

The zero tolerance nonsense made for a sad sight as well; everyone was sitting twiddling their thumbs for five minutes before each game. Boring, stressful, pointless. It must have gladdened the hearts of the arbiters to see their power over players made manifest so visibly, and of course it also meant that we all had to listen to their tedious announcements as well.

What steps exactly have Stewart and Nigel taken to get the ZTN revoked? Oh yes, I remember. Nigel's all for it because he couldn't beat some German 2500 giving 15-1 time odds.....

I do not believe FIDE are responsible for organising the European Club Championship. Using the events title as a clue, the responsibility lies with the European Chess Union.
As for FIDE team events (like the Olympiad), the organising team (TAP) is pretty flexible in allowing last minute replacements. Certainly at the last two Olympiads, I have been a member of TAP, and we spend a lot of time allowing teams to make last minute team changes. Going back even further, the PNG team was allowed to register Rupert Jones as a team member in 2004 (after round 1 had been played), as we were short a player. The whole exercise took around 20 minutes, with no extra charges.

Zero tolerance has been taken out of the Laws of Chess from the 1st July 2014 (you can buy Stewart Reuben a drink next time you see him!). Of course organisers can set their own default time, but FIDE are no longer telling organisers what that should be.