British Junior Championships

[Susan Owens]

My original query was if the British Junior event was held separately from the British Major and Open. I had noticed the lack of entries from top english junior players in their specific age group catagories, and I thought that it was a shame the British Junior Championships were not seen in a higher regard.
Since Peter has been in position he states he uses the British Junior event as one of his selection tournaments, and he encourages english juniors to enter their own age group. I think it has improved entries slightly.
I think it would be great for England to have their own English Junior Championships, but from a selfish view point I don't think this would help the status of the British junior event in the junior calendar.

Susan Owens
Director Women's Chess, Wales

[David Shepherd]

I believe regardless of whatever selection method is used there should always be automatic selection of some players based on grade, performance at the British and titles. For example if a junior reaches IM or GM titles and are playing actively they should be selected in addition to any other player. If they finish above a certain position in the main British Championship (not the junior) they should be offered a place (if it is too close to the dates for that year then in the year after) or they should be offered a place if they obtain a certain rating eg ECF 200 FIDE 2400 etc depending on age.

They should not be made/allowed to play in selection tournaments as it could distort the result in a swiss and leads to them having to incur addittional expense probably to play players they can easily beat. The automatic selections should however be limited to those with a realistic chance of say a top 5 - 10 finish (rather than an outside chance). It would of course mean taking more than one player sometimes.

[Alex Holowczak]

... they should be offered a place if they obtain a certain rating eg ECF 200 FIDE 2400 etc depending on age.

I would be very keen to ignore grades and ratings for juniors. In my experience, they are inaccurate. I've explained this in more detail in the grading forum on this site. The jist is that juniors improve so quickly, that they are frankly redundant. Particularly if you use grades from July the year before to determine strength at Easter the following year. It's impossible to determine who has improved and who hasn't since then, and if so, by how much they have improved.

[David Shepherd]

Infact I disagree I am talking about "super strong" players who are extremely likely to become GMs - they tend to play adults and probably have more realistic grade than most juniors - yes they improve rapidly and their ratings tend to be too low - my idea is that the grade is just a saftey net and yes there will be strong players with a lower grade than they should have, but I am not saying they should not be selected just that when a junior at a certain age reaches a specified grade they should be selected automatically (in a similar way to how they become eligible to play in the main section of the British). I would envisage only 2 or 3 players each year being strong enough for automatic selection in that way.

[Alex Holowczak]

If the idea though is to form an ultra-prestigious tournament, you can't have the best players not playing. Suppose one section had a FIDE titled player in it, and the rest of the players were of a lower standard. There is an opportunity for the rest of the players exceed expectations. I also think it's good that the super-strong player prove he is just that in direct competition with rivals battling against him for the place in the team. It would also show the standard that the rest of the players have to reach to be competitive while playing for England in an international event. Indeed, it'd be interesting to see how the players approach going up against a player that on paper they should lose to.

[Rob Thompson]

As I seem to be one of the few juniors on here, i feel i ought to put in my opinions. The selection tournament run this year was not a secret. All the top(ish) juniors knew about it, and so it worked. James Foster was mentionied earlier in this thread - he was pretty well the only surprise qualification, and it will be interesting to see how well he does at the European Championship this year. The U-16 British Championships is going to be fide rated, as someone mentioned earlier.

The people asking for a single event over Easter are going to have trouble because invariably, for one reason or another, some of the top players will be unable to enter. The grand prix this season has worked because it has given everyone a chance to qualify - apart from Yately all of the events were open. The players were invited to the selection tournament based on both the grand prix and on players that the selectors (notably Victor Cross and Peter Purland - many thanks must go to them for the excellent job they do for junior chess) knew as strong players.The Grand Prix in its previous incarnation was ineffective as it allowed juniors to qualify for international junior events by scoring well in adult events, but the changes made for this season have made it a very good system.

There was a point made that the strongest players shouldn't be allowed to play in the qualification events and should just be invited anyway. I point out that at Yately, Yang-Fang did play, and didn't cruise to an easy victory - I can't remember how he finished, but i played him in Round 4 on 2/3. This proves that even the top players have to work for their wins in junior events, and that when playing these top players, the others still play to get points, rather than just go through the motions (personally, i blundered from a drawn ending to lose )

On the subject of the British Junior Championships, the U-18 and U-21 are included in the British Championship proper as it is, so it would make no sense to separate them from the others, and there are not enough strong juniors of that age to make a workable seperate tournament. An example of this sparcity of numbers was shown at the recent tournament at Millfield (thanks go to Matthew Turner and his parents for organising it). Of the 24 players, i think that only 6 were over U-16, and only 1 or 2 over U-18, so a seperate tournament wouldn't for these age groups.

[David Shepherd]

Rob - sorry I did not quite say what I meant - what I meant to say was that they should not be allowed to play if there was a single selection event since if they won (which is obviously not guaranteed as there are many good standard juniors) a distortion may occur as a swiss system does not necessarily work out 2nd place correctly although it would be a function of the number of rounds and number of players (similar problems could occur with girls in a mixed tournament) or even if they did not win overall they could wipe out the chances of say the second best person by beating them. In short what I am advocating is that if there is a exceptionally strong player they should be taken and a further place given to another person using the existing rules. Yes Yately had strong players including Yan Fan and Felix which was good for the other players and clearly a number of strong junior tournaments is desirable and good for chess.

By the way yes I agree the grand prix was better this year - shame the final results aren't on the web yet or have I missed them?

[Rob Thompson]

I'm not sure where they are, if anywhere, but in the U-16's I think Saravannan Satyananda won (sorry if misspelt), James Foster 2nd, so they qualified for the olympiad and the Europeans. Interestingly, Saravannan opted to play in the Olympiad, despite it being secondary to the European, because he had played in the European previously in younger age groups, so James is going. It will be interesting to see how he does, as he only qualified via the grad Prix and would certainly have been not considered/missed had it not existed and the qualification only done on grades (his ECF grade is in the high 130s, and i'm not sure if he has a fide rating)

About the distortion possible from strong players, i think this is a reason against having a single tournament deciding everything - a lucky draw could make a weaker player qualify, and an unlucky draw could mean that a stronger player didn't. With the current Grand Prix system, you would have to be seriously unlucky to have unfortunate draws at all the qualification events.

[Philip Adams]

The top twenty players in the current Spanish U18 championship:

1. Salgado Lopez, Ivan 2558 g 2558 GAL
2. Alonso Rosell, Alvar 2461 m 2461 CAT
3. Recuero Guerra, David 2460 m 2460 AST
4. Arribas Lopez, Angel 2429 f 2429 MAD
5. Cabrera Trujillo, Jorge 2410 f 2410 CAN
6. Espinosa Aranda, Angel 2350 f 2350 CTM
7. Pardo Simon, David 2321 2321 VAL
8. Moreno Gracia, Daniel 2313 f 2313 ARA
9. Forcen Esteban, Daniel 2308 2308 ARA
10. Herrera Delgado, Alejandro 2297 2297 AND
11. Camacho Collados, Marcos 2267 2267 AND
12. Fernandez Garcia, Jose Miguel 2261 2261 AND
13. Antolin Concha, Diego 2252 2252 ARA
14. Garcia Moreno, Carlos 2245 2245 CTM
15. Martin Fuentes, Alberto 2244 2244 CNT
16. Moreno Martin, Daniel 2231 2231 CAT
17. Coll Ortega, Jordi 2213 2213 CAT
18. Diaz Herrero, Alvaro 2187 2187 EUS
19. Zamarbide Inarrea, Daniel 2176 2176 NAV
20. Garcia Molina, Francisco Miguel 2164 2164 AND

There are over 100 players registered for this event!

Notice that even the strongest eligible players such as GM Salgado are playing. Sources:

http://www.ajedrezenmadrid.com/torneos/calen_tot.asp
http://feda.org/campeonatos.php

Eat your hearts out ...

I acknowledge that Peter Purland and others have been working very hard on our junior organization, including tournaments, but I can't help feeling we've got some way to go yet, and I'm not at all convinced that we are moving in the right direction.

Why do we persist in thinking that the homespun English way of doing these things has to be superior, when clearly other countries are achieving so much more with very different methods.

[Rob Thompson]

we could never achieve entries like that because we don't have that many top players, so saying our tournaments should be the same is completely fatuous. If we achieved that level of players, then we could consider a seperate event from the British that would cater for them. Also, how much funding is that tournament getting?

[Richard James]

I acknowledge that Peter Purland and others have been working very hard on our junior organization, including tournaments, but I can't help feeling we've got some way to go yet, and I'm not at all convinced that we are moving in the right direction.

Why do we persist in thinking that the homespun English way of doing these things has to be superior, when clearly other countries are achieving so much more with very different methods.

You're quite right. I totally agree with you. We have been getting things wrong for many years, which is why there are so few adult players in this country much under the age of 50.

We have been blinded by the success of a small number of individuals and misled by the chimera of Primary Schools chess into thinking our methods are successful. But, compared with other countries they are anything but. We have a system devised by a combination of chess players with little understanding of children and teachers with little understanding of chess. Yes, there are very many people in junior chess doing fantastic jobs, frequently unpaid, but sadly most of it is misdirected.

Some of the problems are cultural and educational and, as such, out of our control, but there is much that could be changed as long as we start from the understanding that much of what we are doing, at all levels, is wrong.

Several members of this forum will be aware that I've been saying this for the past 15 years or more.

[IM Jack Rudd]

My analysis of selection methods would start from the assumption that there is, for any event, an (impossible to know beforehand) optimal selection of players for the ECF to send to that event, and the job of the selection method is to maximize the chances of finding that optimal selection. Your methods can go wrong in a number of ways, which can be divided into two major categories: Intrinsic Distortion and Noise.

Noise is the general term for things that can randomly affect your selection process, no matter how good it is. If a player is ill at the time of a selection tournament, this is a noise effect: it will probably worsen his play - and therefore his chances of selection - without necessarily lowering the probability of his being in the optimal selection. (Of course, if he's consistently ill at the times of selection tournaments, that's a different matter - it's an indicator of poor overall health, which would probably also mar his performances in the event itself.) The more selection tournaments you hold, the lower the effect of Noise on your selections.

Intrinsic Distortion, on the other hand, is when your selection process does something that consistently worsens your selections. For example, suppose that players tend to have varying results based on the ages and/or sexes of their opponents. If you're selecting players for an event where they're going to be playing exclusively against players of their own age and sex, then using a selection method that doesn't adjust for those variations is going to result in your consistently sending sub-optimal selections of players.

Selections based on rating are likely to be low on Noise, but highly susceptible to Intrinsic Distortion. Well-constructed selection tournaments will have considerably less Intrinsic Distortion but appreciably more Noise. Balancing the two can be a tricky process.

[Roger de Coverly]

I happened to come across the Pardubice website

http://www.czechopen.net/tournaments/youthteams.php

and the results at

http://chess-results.com/tnr23805.aspx? ... =1&flag=30

There aren't any British teams participating.

Is it not the case that there are now more international junior events than the ECF has the money or the capacity to send players or teams? Is the point of a selection tournament to establish
(a) that the nominated players for international events aren't complete patzers and
(b) that it's worth spending the ECF's and the JRT's resources and money on them?

[Rob Thompson]

For the current system we have, the grand prix system reduces noise, as it is unlikely that a normally healthy player will be ill for many tournaments, for example. The fact that qualification tournaments are all junior events, as opposed to adult ones in previous years, also serves to decrease intrinsic distortion as well

[Alex Holowczak]

For the current system we have, the grand prix system reduces noise, as it is unlikely that a normally healthy player will be ill for many tournaments, for example. The fact that qualification tournaments are all junior events, as opposed to adult ones in previous years, also serves to decrease intrinsic distortion as well

The problem with having a Grand Prix style of events is cost. Many juniors' parents will not be prepared to play in junior events all over the country, simple due to the financing of it. The idea of the selection is to pick the best players to play for England, not to pick the players who have the best combination of chess skill and affluent parents.