I trust that a draft of the revised rules will be circulated for comment, at least to Union Controllers and to the Governance Committee. If this had been done with the present rules (as was requested), we might not be needing the current rewrite.Alex Holowczak wrote:The County Championship rules are being rewritten at the moment. Nothing controversial is necessarily changing; it's just an attempt to clarify these things. It'll go before Council in April. For example, there was previously discussion on here about whether the first time control could not be before move 40 in a national Championship game. This has been amended to make it explicitly clear. The time control for the National Final has been changed. The potential for telephone matches remains, though.
Why? Moreover, I very much hope that you mean "will be changed from 2013 onwards".Alex Holowczak wrote:The time control for the National Final has been changed.
I have long favoured a variant of (2), incorporating a more radical change to the sustem of entry fees for the Counties Championships. Instead of charging a fee to each county at the start of the Union Qualifying Stages, the ECF should charge an inevitably rather larger fee for each nomination to each Union at the start of the National Stages. This could incorporate a deposit element which would be returned if everyone who represented the nominee in the National Stages were an ECF member.Alex Holowczak wrote:Nothing about membership has been written in to the rules yet, because the result of Saturday's vote is being awaited. There are a few potential rules - I'm not sure which is best:
(1) A county fielding a non-member is disqualified from the event.
(2) A county fielding a non-member must pay a fine equivalent to the rate of membership required to play County chess for each non-member in their team.
(3) A county fielding a non-member will be deemed to have lost the game he plays; his opponent is deemed to have won it, and the county incurs a penalty point.
Thoughts?
Of course the entry fees could be considerably lower if the ECF didn't insist on arranging a venue in Leicestershire at which Kent and Surrey have to play each other, but that's another story.