Northumbria Masters

[Chris Rice]

I hadn't heard of the Schiller system before but it seems a really good way of helping norm seekers. Tim Wall explained on British Chess News:

"Happy to announce an excellent line up for the Northumbria Chess Masters IM Norm Schiller Team Tournament, 24-28 August in Newcastle upon Tyne. Under the Schiller system, named after the late Eric Schiller, four teams of three players play nine rounds against the players in the other three teams. With an average opposition for each norm seeker of 2283.5+, a score of 6.5/9 is required for an IM norm.

Three experienced IMs (Angus Dunnington, Gavin Wall and Peter Large) take on a hungry field of mostly young talents, including Ireland’s Trisha Kanyamarala, Scotland’s Freddie Waldhausen Gordon & England’s Borna Dorsa Derakhshani."

Here are the four teams on the chess results server

I've been aware of it for some, I'm fairly sure that Adam Raoof used it 20+ years ago. I had wondered about using it instead of an all-play-all but settled for the latter as it's much simpler to explain and understand!

I'm sure its well known amongst norm seekers Loz but at my sub-standard level its never appeared on the dashboard Quite impressed with the simplicity of the system as you say, easy to understand and credit to Eric Schiller for coming up with it.

[Wadih Khoury]

Entries now at 28/51/25/24/15

So hopefully where Tim would like to see it at.

The top section looks really nice (probably the most homogeneous field outside the British or closed events) , and while I would not support all UK events to have a floor, I think that floors do have a place in the UK as they do on the continent.

[Tim Spanton]

Entries now at 28/51/25/24/15

So hopefully where Tim would like to see it at.

The top section looks really nice (probably the most homogeneous field outside the British or closed events) , and while I would not support all UK events to have a floor, I think that floors do have a place in the UK as they do on the continent.

Actually, if you go to chess-results.com and bring up the full list of players across all tournaments the total is 167.

[LawrenceCooper]

Heading into the last day there are at least four norms:

GM norm: Rajat Makkar
https://chess-results.com/tnr802867.asp ... g=30&snr=4

IM norm: Borna Derakhshani, Freddy Gordon & Krzysztof Raczek.

https://chess-results.com/tnr802873.asp ... g=30&snr=6
https://chess-results.com/tnr802873.asp ... g=30&snr=5
https://chess-results.com/tnr802873.asp ... g=30&snr=3

[Mick Norris]

IM for Edvin Trost who has 2 norms from earlier this summer?

[LawrenceCooper]

IM for Edvin Trost who has 2 norms from earlier this summer?

Ah yes, forgot to check for IM norms in the GM norm section Tanmay Chopra will have one as well.

[Mick Norris]

Really successful then

[LawrenceCooper]

https://twitter.com/timpeterwall/status ... 5328161834

[Christopher Kreuzer]

Seven title norms at one event is impressive. I am aware this is in part due to the format used, but is this some sort of record relative to the number of people playing? There were 24 people playing in the norm events, I think (four teams of three - one set for the GM pool and one set for the IM pool), and seven of those 24 players got norms? That is nearly a third, though you have to take into account that one of the norms was the IM norm by the same FM who got a GM norm! (So actually, 6 people got seven norms.)

Obviously you can get more norms overall at an event like the Chess Olympiad, but does anyone know whether there are any events that claim to have had a record number of norms achieved (OTB chess norms, before anyone starts including arbiter and organiser norms)? I wonder if the records held by FIDE could be analysed to establish these sorts of records? Anecdotally, does anyone know of or remember events that yielded lots of norms?

[Christopher Kreuzer]

Adding to the above, Tim Wall's newsflash said:

"7 title norms scored at the Northumbria Masters (@NorthMasters): GM norm for 16yo Rajat Makkar, IM norms for Krysztof Raczek, Borna Derakhshani, Freddie Waldhausen Gordon, Edvin Trost, Tanmay Chopra and Makkar."

So that is IM norms for all three of the FMs in the top (GM) group, and IM norms for 3 of the 5 FMs in the next group down (the IM group). This is impressive, but tempered slightly when you realise that the FMs in the top group were rated 2417, 2377 and 2442, which is about the same as the lowest-rated of the GMs (Andrei Maksimenko, at 2428, who scored an impressively consistent 9 draws in a row).

Would it be right to say that the rating and norm requirements were eased by having higher-rated FMs and lower-rated GMs? Is that the only way to get such tournaments to work in practice?

The other thing that stands out is how poorly the IMs performed, though maybe not when you consider that at least in the top group they were up against high-rated FMs. But the 9 IMs across both groups (the 6 in the GM group and the 3 in the IM group) all scored less than 50% and all seem to have lost rating points (though I am not sure chess-results.com is displaying that accurately for all of them). Do I have that right? (The format makes sense but can be confusing once you start to try and drill down into the results.)

[IM Jack Rudd]

The chances of norms certainly improve as the ratings of the norm-seekers do, because rating and probability of reaching a given TPR are both increasing functions of skill. The ratings of the GMs shouldn't matter too much in that regard, although there is the threshold issue where some fields are harder to get norms against than others because the average rating has dropped enough to make the norm target half a point higher.

[Christopher Kreuzer]

Thanks, Jack. I was probably over-thinking it. The lowest-rated FM in the world if they are massively under-rated will be quite capable of storming through a field of whatever rating and scoring 8/9 for a GM norm, but as you say, a high-rated FM would be more likely (even expected) to score an IM norm against a field like this. And any player is quite capable of performing below their rating. The IMs must have felt more than normal that targets were on their backs with the norm-seeking FMs on the hunt!!

EDIT: Overall score of the FMs against the IMs in the GM group: 5/6 + 4/6 + 3.5/6 (only one IM beat an FM in the top group: Matthew Wadsworth beating Edvin Trost). Overall score of the norm-achieving FMs against the IMs in the IM group: 3/3 + 2/3 + 2/3 (none of the IMs beat any of the norm-achieving FMs).

Overall: 19.5/27 (+13, =13, -1). That is pretty conclusive for saying that the FMs trounced the IMs! (And also did well against the GMs as well.)

Best seen at this link:

https://chess-results.com/tnr802867.asp ... g=30&snr=4

[NickFaulks]

IM for Edvin Trost who has 2 norms from earlier this summer?

Seven consecutive whites? Seriously?

[LawrenceCooper]

IM for Edvin Trost who has 2 norms from earlier this summer?

Seven consecutive whites? Seriously?

Looking at the PGN he had four whites and five blacks. I did wonder when I saw various triple colours on chess-results how accurate the colours were but looking on the FIDE website we see the colour allocation you mention:
https://ratings.fide.com/calculations.p ... 1&rating=0

[NickFaulks]

Looking at the PGN he had four whites and five blacks.

Thanks, I presume the PGNs are definitive. It's a shame the colours could not have been reported correctly, because these things do get looked at, particularly when permission has been given for an innovative system to be used.