2017 European Ind Ch 29 May - 11 June (Minsk)

[Roger de Coverly]

have we had 3 qualifiers before?

If you include the FIDE World Championships, there were 5 qualifiers in 1999
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FIDE_Worl ... rticipants
Adams, Short, Sadler, Miles, Speelman.

Two years before in December 1997, there had been 4.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FIDE_Worl ... rticipants

Adams, Sadler, Short, Wells

[LawrenceCooper]

The tournament tie-breaks have come in for criticism on Facebook by the ACP president who, coincidentally, missed out on the world cup qualifying places on tie-break. Apparently his view is shared almost unanimously among his colleagues.

[Christopher Kreuzer]

Does anyone know what norms were achieved?

(Is that Facebook post publicly available?)

[Kevin Thurlow]

"The tournament tie-breaks have come in for criticism on Facebook by the ACP president who, coincidentally, missed out on the world cup qualifying places on tie-break. Apparently his view is shared almost unanimously among his colleagues."

I wonder if his colleagues have said that publicly, (which I'm sure was your point.) Tie-breaks are always controversial. I assume they were published in advance?

[LawrenceCooper]

"The tournament tie-breaks have come in for criticism on Facebook by the ACP president who, coincidentally, missed out on the world cup qualifying places on tie-break. Apparently his view is shared almost unanimously among his colleagues."

I wonder if his colleagues have said that publicly, (which I'm sure was your point.) Tie-breaks are always controversial. I assume they were published in advance?

Of course

[Stewart Reuben]

Some years ago the tiebreaks for the European Championship were NOT published until after the conclusion of the last round. They had forgotten.
Using Bucholtz for tiebreaks is nonsense.
The late Harry Baines, 'The players should know, in advance of the start of the last round, what they have to do'.
Paraphrasing the late Arpad Elo, 'All tie breaks are flawed'.
Me in about 1980, 'Sonneborn-Berger (not used in this event) is less accurate than tossing a coin'.
Greater number of Blacks is objective.
Greater number of wins is OK if your objective is to encourage more aggressive play. A bit silly that though, when your utlimate objective is to find the Challenger for the World Championship. That is won by a player taking fewer risks.

[LawrenceCooper]

He did mention that 27th place and above qualified.

[Mick Norris]

The tournament tie-breaks have come in for criticism on Facebook by the ACP president who, coincidentally, missed out on the world cup qualifying places on tie-break. Apparently his view is shared almost unanimously among his colleagues.

He's such a quiet unassuming guy too

I can see that WC qualifiers has been updated; is there an official list somewhere?

[NickFaulks]

He's such a quiet unassuming guy too

No doubt we shall hear before long that some of the players who edged him out were cheating and/or bribed their opponents to throw games.

[LawrenceCooper]

Emil Sutovsky via Facebook:

Time to reflect on the European Championship in Minsk. First of all, congratulations to the winners: Maxim Matlakov is a new European Champion - he kept on playing high-class chess throughout the event and deservedly took the title. Baadur Jobava and Vladimir Fedoseev showed great fighting spirit and enterprising chess to take home silver and bronze respectively. Well done indeed!
ECU and Belorussian organizers should be praised for the event : the tournament was organized on a very good level, and most of the players enjoyed the time in Minsk regardless of their result.
Few important remarks:
Qualification: European players are constantly underrepresented in the World Cup. With only 46 spots for the continent, it leads to a strange scenario time after time: nearly a dozen of European 2700-players don't qualify (not speaking of the hordes of 2650+ Grandmasters) , whereas it is much easier to qualify from all other continents. Many qualifying events on other continents don't have a single 2700 player among the participants, some of them don't even have a 2650+ players taking part...
The distribution of spots is not based on the relative chess strength, but depends largely on the political considerations of FIDE. Add to that the wild-card system: 10 out of 128 spots are wild cards. We have to minimize the number of wild-cards in the World Cup.
Tie-break system:
Bucholz is not a best system for such a large Swiss tournament. TPR is more objective tie-breaker in such a format.
I discussed it with a number of players at the beginning of the tournament. The issue is too technical to discuss here - you are invited to express your opinion in the comments.
European Zonals:
There must be some clear policy in this regards.
ECU has decided to award one spot to the Nordic Zonal this year - reestablishing the old system. It might be a good idea, but as long as it is executed in one Zone (or two, or three), it leads to a situation, where some players have more chances to qualify.
It is unfair, and should be avoided for the next cycle - either stick to European Championships, or make sure that Zonals will be staged everywhere.
Participation of already qualified players:
This is another serious issue. Not sure how to avoid it,
but the participation of the players who have already qualified, leads to a mess. In much more ways that I can describe here. Not sure what to do about it. But judging from the conversation with the colleagues, it does annoy many a players. Once again, you are welcome to express your opinion.

[NickFaulks]

The ACP refuse to accept that there is no ideal tie-break system. I don't like Buchholz much, but TPR has many issues, one being that there is no fully satisfactory way to calculate it. A few Congresses ago they insisted that it was QC's job to devise a universally applicable TPR formula. I promised to do that after we had worked out how to turn base metal into gold.

What the EC needs is a playoff tournament, probably a rapid Swiss taking a full day. Since that is presumably out of the question on grounds of cost and logistics, I would advocate pulling names out of a hat. Nobody can say it isn't objective, and more players would go into the last round knowing they needed to win for certain qualification.

[Alan Walton]

The ACP refuse to accept that there is no ideal tie-break system. I don't like Buchholz much, but TPR has many issues, one being that there is no fully satisfactory way to calculate it. A few Congresses ago they insisted that it was QC's job to devise a universally applicable TPR formula. I promised to do that after we had worked out how to turn base metal into gold.

What the EC needs is a playoff tournament, probably a rapid Swiss taking a full day. Since that is presumably out of the question on grounds of cost and logistics, I would advocate pulling names out of a hat. Nobody can say it isn't objective, and more players would go into the last round knowing they needed to win for certain qualification.

If your saying TPR has issues and no satisfactory way of calculating it, doesn't this then say all norm calculations are unsatisfactory as these are calculated on tournament performance anyway; you cannot have it both ways

The question is if you have the tiebreak just a pure performance (as I believe Emil is suggesting), or relative performance which does require additional calculations

[Alex Holowczak]

The most sensible solution if the tie needs to be broken is a playoff of some sort. Buchholz and TPR are just arithmetic calculations that don't mean much. It'd be like having a golf tournament with tied players after 72 holes, and deciding the winner was the player who made the most birdies, or the player who hit more Greens In Regulation.

For the British Championship, I rewrote the regulations for what happens if there was a tie. Previously the regulations were that the Chief Arbiter would make it up the night before. Now, there are knockout playoffs, and the players are seeded by TPR to determine who plays who/who gets the bye if more than 2 players are tied. Rightly or wrongly, strong players do seem to like TPR, and when I asked them, there seemed to be confidence in TPR.

[NickFaulks]

If your saying TPR has issues and no satisfactory way of calculating it, doesn't this then say all norm calculations are unsatisfactory as these are calculated on tournament performance anyway; you cannot have it both ways

No, it absolutely doesn't say that. There are four different definitions of TPR for norms, one tailored for each title. That is my point - people are very careless in their use of the term "tournament performance".

[Kevin Thurlow]

"Qualification: European players are constantly underrepresented in the World Cup. With only 46 spots for the continent, it leads to a strange scenario time after time: nearly a dozen of European 2700-players don't qualify (not speaking of the hordes of 2650+ Grandmasters) , whereas it is much easier to qualify from all other continents. Many qualifying events on other continents don't have a single 2700 player among the participants, some of them don't even have a 2650+ players taking part..."

Move to Africa?

The same thing happens in the football World Cup, where the organisers feel that a World Cup should have teams from all over the world. So there are always European teams who just miss qualification then see a non-European team lose every game. But those are the rules.

He has a point that people already qualified can play in this event and maybe influence who else qualifies. Ideally, you would have a separate qualifying event, but maybe sponsors would not be so keen to pay for it.