The 40 point Rule

General discussions about ratings.
Roger de Coverly
Posts: 21291
Joined: Tue Apr 15, 2008 2:51 pm

Re: The 40 point Rule

Post by Roger de Coverly » Tue Apr 19, 2011 11:51 pm

William Metcalfe wrote:You meen the thread where neill now agrees membership will acually be good for juniors and meen there grades will be more accurate
The one where he notes that a schools league and an inter-county junior event will no longer be graded because of the additional expense or that he is unwilling to restrict the players to members only. Also where he notes that he can calculate private grades if necessary without involving the ECF.

For players who aren't members of clubs, £ 18/£12 a head to play in a single event without prize money is a disincentive. Even for members of clubs, if your membership cost is already £ 50 or more (because of venue costs), you are approaching the point where every additional £ 10 increases the chance that a critical number will walk away. Perhaps they will play on the internet, or just enter the occasional Congress. Either way your league loses viability.

Flat rate membership schemes mean that those of us who play in a lot of events will be subsidised by those who don't. When it costs an adult player between £ 300 to £ 500 to play in all eleven rounds of the 4NCL, it is frankly penny pinching of the 4NCL not to pay the ECF a tax of perhaps £ 6 per player. They are making more than that per head on hotel commissions.

William Metcalfe
Posts: 585
Joined: Tue Apr 10, 2007 3:12 pm
Location: Darlington

Re: The 40 point Rule

Post by William Metcalfe » Wed Apr 20, 2011 12:28 am

You still have not answered my question why is the south so differant from the north.Show me any signs of were membership has forced people to walk away from chess up here.
You have had long enough to provide me the statistical proof as we have had membership up here since 2006/2007
I am speaking here for myself and not the NCCU which i am now president of

Roger de Coverly
Posts: 21291
Joined: Tue Apr 15, 2008 2:51 pm

Re: The 40 point Rule

Post by Roger de Coverly » Wed Apr 20, 2011 1:07 am

William Metcalfe wrote:You still have not answered my question why is the south so differant from the north.Show me any signs of were membership has forced people to walk away from chess up here.
How would you ever know?

In the first year of NMS it was claimed there were over 1500 members, it's well under 1000 now. Not a totally fair comparison because of all the local schemes, I agree. But if you follow the money, the various MOs raised less than £ 10,000. That doesn't make much of a dent in a funding requirement of £ 160,000. In fact at well under 1000, that's fewer than turned up at a single London congress in the 1970s.

What you have to look at is how many new players you are recruiting and whether the overall numbers are increasing or decreasing.

In the London and the South-East and perhaps the West, East Anglia and Midlands, the ECF is making major income from
(a) those who play a lot of congresses without being ECF members
and
(b) those who play in a lot of leagues
and
(c) by comparison to MO members, anyone who is a Direct Member

If you convert all these people into flat rate members at £ 18 a head, then the ECF potentially loses money. To replace it, you have to raise more money form those who don't play as much, or for that matter from Northern members who were previously only paying £ 11 or thereabouts. There are reasons why people don't play 50 games or more a year. It's not the marginal cost of 50p or so a game, rather that they don't have the time, energy or inclination to play more. Particularly at the lower levels of activity, you risk driving them away altogether if you introduce disincentives whether financial or aggravation.

William Metcalfe
Posts: 585
Joined: Tue Apr 10, 2007 3:12 pm
Location: Darlington

Re: The 40 point Rule

Post by William Metcalfe » Wed Apr 20, 2011 2:27 am

You are really good at making statements but you never answer a question when challenged
And the original NMS had a lot more than 1000 members
It also got money from areas than had never contributed before
How do i know this well i was there right from the beginning of the NMS being set up it was how i got involved in local chess polotics
We even got welsh people and players from lancs and Yorks to contribute to a English chess federation areas that had never contributed 1p before NMS
But the big issue that i see is some of us acually get of our backsides and do things while others snipe from the sidelines
I am speaking here for myself and not the NCCU which i am now president of

Roger de Coverly
Posts: 21291
Joined: Tue Apr 15, 2008 2:51 pm

Re: The 40 point Rule

Post by Roger de Coverly » Wed Apr 20, 2011 7:55 am

William Metcalfe wrote:And the original NMS had a lot more than 1000 members
It also got money from areas than had never contributed before


The original NMS was a bit of con-trick in my opinion and I thought so at the time. Nowhere in the original documentation http://www.elca.org.uk/artman/publish/article_68.shtml did it ever point out that for those who didn't play many games, that payments to the ECF per head would work out cheaper. Given the subsequent furore about signing ECF membership forms, what did people think they were signing up to? Game Fee was, what about 35p at the time. So the sell was that you paid £ 10 to the NMS in order that your club's league fees could reduce by an unspecified amount. Had the amount of reduction been specified as £ 3.50 for 10 games or £ 7.00 for twenty, it would have been obvious that the "average" player would not be saving anything.

to quote from http://www.atticuschess.org.uk/forum/ph ... c.php?t=22
2. The NCCU does not have any ECF forms to send to the ECF Office. Most NMS members refused to sign them! – The ECF confirmed that the vast majority of NMS members were NOT ECF members!
My italics

http://www.elca.org.uk/artman/publish/article_68.shtml

Just to quote one para showing what I consider a misleading statement :-
Massive rises each year in the level of BCF Game fee (19% increase this season alone) means ever more expense for the chess player and for all BCF graded events (be they league, congress, rapidplay, county or junior events). The game fee is hidden in entry fees to these events, but is very apparent to treasurers and event organisers who struggle to keep events afloat.
Is not that the reason why the BCF was increasing Game Fee was that as a primary source of funding for the BCF, the BCF's net expenses were increasing at the same rate as Game Fee? If you totally replaced Game Fee with membership, you would have exactly the same problem, only this time it would be the per head cost that would have to increase. This is what the BCF were doing in the years prior to Game Fee with the county affiliation payments. Game Fee was an attempt to spread the collection of funding for the BCF over a wider base of players, in particular so that the most enthusiastic players paid a bit more.

It's per head schemes that are objected to rather than membership. We have seen from the Bridge world that you can combine (free) membership with pay to play. If you have a per head scheme, you potentially put off new players. Even Congress organisers in the North seem to realise this, as I don't think there are any which are completely closed to non-members. Even the ECF in the Option 1 scheme realise this for Congresses, since they have the non-member charge.

When first introduced, I think Game Fee had the support of about 90% of the country. Even the NCCU minutes at http://www.nccu.org.uk/nccu/mins/index.htm are silent on the issue for a number of years even though they found plenty to complain about regarding grading and other things. I had never realised until recently that it was Gerry Walsh who first proposed the NMS idea and the abolition of Game Fee. In some ways that should have disqualified him from the job of ECF President, let alone being in charge of the Office which was administering it.

Roger de Coverly
Posts: 21291
Joined: Tue Apr 15, 2008 2:51 pm

Re: The 40 point Rule

Post by Roger de Coverly » Wed Apr 20, 2011 8:48 am

Bob Clark wrote: As we have established on another thread the Bridge world has just introduced pay to play whether it works or not has yet to established.
Indeed we shall. The EBU moved from pay per head to pay per event as what appeared to be a move to increase revenues and get more head-count involved. As with any pay per event scheme, it will gain if it can promote affiliated events and lose if it cannot. What it has done is to reduce barriers, it, the EBU was erecting against new and returning members to play in affiliated events or at affiliated clubs.

Neill Cooper
Posts: 1298
Joined: Sun Feb 24, 2008 4:43 pm
Location: Cumbria
Contact:

Re: The 40 point Rule

Post by Neill Cooper » Wed Apr 20, 2011 8:51 am

William Metcalfe wrote:You meen the thread where neill now agrees membership will acually be good for juniors and meen there grades will be more accurate
What I agree to is that the vast majority of juniors will stop being ECF graded. Those who remain will have more accurate grades in that they will be based on playing in adult not junior events.
It has already happened in Berkshire where over 1000 juniors have a Berks Junior Grade but only about 50 have an ECF grade http://www.bjca.org.uk/grades.php

User avatar
Adam Raoof
Posts: 2720
Joined: Sat Oct 04, 2008 4:16 pm
Location: NW4 4UY
Contact:

Re: The 40 point Rule

Post by Adam Raoof » Wed Apr 20, 2011 8:58 am

Neill Cooper wrote:
William Metcalfe wrote:You meen the thread where neill now agrees membership will acually be good for juniors and meen there grades will be more accurate
What I agree to is that the vast majority of juniors will stop being ECF graded. Those who remain will have more accurate grades in that they will be based on playing in adult not junior events.
It has already happened in Berkshire where over 1000 juniors have a Berks Junior Grade but only about 50 have an ECF grade http://www.bjca.org.uk/grades.php
Neill, if the ECF aims to have as many juniors as possible on the grading system and in membership what approach do you think we should take to make that happen? Would it make a difference if juniors paid £10 a head to join the ECF?
Adam Raoof IA, IO
Chess England Events - https://chessengland.com/
The Chess Circuit - https://chesscircuit.substack.com/
Don’t stop playing chess!

Roger de Coverly
Posts: 21291
Joined: Tue Apr 15, 2008 2:51 pm

Re: The 40 point Rule

Post by Roger de Coverly » Wed Apr 20, 2011 9:13 am

Adam Raoof wrote:
Neill Cooper wrote: It has already happened in Berkshire where over 1000 juniors have a Berks Junior Grade but only about 50 have an ECF grade http://www.bjca.org.uk/grades.php
Neill, if the ECF aims to have as many juniors as possible on the grading system and in membership what approach do you think we should take to make that happen? Would it make a difference if juniors paid £10 a head to join the ECF?
The Berks Junior website does say that only 450 are active, so it's 1 in 9 with an ECF grade rather than 1 in 20.

Can you really see Berks agreeing to pay £ 4,500 to the ECF even indirectly? They're so mean, the AGM won't even agree to pay the SCCU membership fee :) .

Here's what the website says about why the scheme was set up.
As of September, 2004, the ECF (BCF as was at the time) no longer grade junior events for free. It was estimated that to carry on submitting results at the same rate as the 2003-04 season would cost us £800! Instead of increasing tournament entry fees to cover ECF grading charges, we decided to calculate our own grades

Ian Kingston
Posts: 1071
Joined: Sat Apr 14, 2007 3:16 pm
Location: Sutton Coldfield
Contact:

Re: The 40 point Rule

Post by Ian Kingston » Wed Apr 20, 2011 9:14 am

Any chance that this discussion could be moved to a more appropriately named thread?

Roger de Coverly
Posts: 21291
Joined: Tue Apr 15, 2008 2:51 pm

Re: The 40 point Rule

Post by Roger de Coverly » Wed Apr 20, 2011 9:19 am

Bob Clark wrote: This is just not true, pay to play erects a barrier which prevents a returning player or any other player for that matter at an affiliated club from competing unless they pay the EBU 31p.
I would have thought having to pay £ 20 as a per head membership under their previous scheme to the EBU was an even bigger barrier. If we're talking about the benefits or otherwise of being a non-member that's a different debate.

It may well be the case that instead of membership increasing the ECF's take for the average club player from around £ 7-9 to £ 18, it will actually reduce it to zero. If true, the costs to those becoming members will become much higher than £ 18.

Mike Truran
Posts: 2393
Joined: Wed Apr 11, 2007 3:44 pm
Contact:

Re: The 40 point Rule

Post by Mike Truran » Wed Apr 20, 2011 9:28 am

"When it costs an adult player between £ 300 to £ 500 to play in all eleven rounds of the 4NCL, it is frankly penny pinching of the 4NCL not to pay the ECF a tax of perhaps £ 6 per player. They are making more than that per head on hotel commissions."

Yet again, you ignore previous rebuttals, pluck random figures out of the air and and post unsubstantiated non sequiturs. The 4NCL breaks even (at best - this year we will make a loss). A £6 tax would simply increase entry fees by £6 x 6 and £6 x 8 respectively or reduce prize money by a similar amount. I repeat - there is no logical link between an organisation's level of funding and whether or not it should pay an ECF tax.

Anyway, your solipsistic view of the world seems to preclude the ability to understand anybody's point of view but your own. There's really not a lot of point posting reasoned counter-arguments that you simply ignore. So I'm going to stop. I see that you've now made 2,730 posts. Perhaps it's time for you to stop as well.

Alan Walton
Posts: 1393
Joined: Mon Nov 02, 2009 8:33 pm
Location: Oldham

Re: The 40 point Rule

Post by Alan Walton » Wed Apr 20, 2011 9:37 am

I seem to be confused

Isn't it the responsibility of the individual to pay the membership fee not the club, if that individual doesn't pay the fee then that player doesn't play for that club in graded league chess, if clubs are willing to take the risk and pay for there players then redeem the cost from said players that is their own risk and should be a worry to the ECF

At 3Cs we would advise all club members to become ECF members (directly through the ECF) if these players are "active" (i.e. play league chess, and a couple of tournament per annum, approx 20 games), obviously being a junior club we would expect there to be a junior rate (say 50%)

And I will reiterate my view, is that if a player plays league chess only then said player would be a part member (discounted rate), all his games are graded in said leagues, if a player thinks he might enter a couple of tournaments in the year, then it is worthwhile him pay a little more so he does pay the non-member fee on entry

I does seem that some chess players want everything on the cheap, if players are only playing a couple of games a year, and decide not to pay membership the ECF aren't really losing that much (say approx £2 per player), so if one player pays £18 in this group it would negate 8 deciding not to bother, does seem to be that major problem

Roger de Coverly
Posts: 21291
Joined: Tue Apr 15, 2008 2:51 pm

Re: The 40 point Rule

Post by Roger de Coverly » Wed Apr 20, 2011 9:40 am

Mike Truran wrote:. A £6 tax would simply increase entry fees by £6 x 6 and £6 x 8 respectively or reduce prize money by a similar amount. I repeat - there is no logical link between an organisation's level of funding and whether or not it should pay an ECF tax.
Exactly. So if the 4NCL won't pay £36 per team or £ 48 per team, the ECF will have to try to extract it directly or indirectly from local clubs.

Neill Cooper
Posts: 1298
Joined: Sun Feb 24, 2008 4:43 pm
Location: Cumbria
Contact:

Re: The 40 point Rule

Post by Neill Cooper » Wed Apr 20, 2011 9:46 am

Adam Raoof wrote:Neill, if the ECF aims to have as many juniors as possible on the grading system and in membership what approach do you think we should take to make that happen? Would it make a difference if juniors paid £10 a head to join the ECF?
Reply in http://www.ecforum.org.uk/viewtopic.php ... 172#p56172
[ps how can I cross reference an individual message?]

Post Reply