Ian Thompson wrote: ↑Sun Mar 26, 2023 10:35 pm
NickFaulks wrote: ↑Sun Mar 26, 2023 9:26 pm
Matt Bridgeman wrote: ↑Sun Mar 26, 2023 8:02 pm
A lift from Susan Polgar’s Facebook post;
The room allocation in the hotel was chaotic. Despite the known arrival times, there were initially no rooms available for several players and they had to wait several hours at five in the morning in the hotel lobby. Others had to vacate their room the next day after moving in.
All sounds fairly normal.
Is that the organiser's responsibility or the players'? The event's regulations say the organisers have to provide rooms from 24 March, so, if a player chooses to arrive in the early hours of that day should they be surprised no room is available unless something was arranged in advance with the organisers?
The other obvious question is what players are doing taking overnight flights the day before play was due to start?
[Ian, why did you remove this bit from the original in what you quoted? "After her arrival in New Delhi, one player was not picked up and transferred by the organizer as agreed, all other players were transferred alone and unaccompanied into taxis in the middle of the night. The players felt extremely insecure."]
You can't both question why players are taking overnight flights and then say the event organisers were only providing rooms from a day before the event starts. Either you provide rooms sufficiently far in advance of the start of the event that players will be able to arrive and recover in time to play, or you make clear in the invitations that players have to cover anything before a certain time themselves (IMO, for events at this level [part of the WC qualification cycle], FIDE should be going above and beyond - for normal tournaments, there would be less expectation).
Have we not gone beyond lowering expectations for chess players at the highest levels? Or is there is hint here of less money and effort being spent on women's chess?
There seems also to be a bit of a reaction to some of the 'emotional roller coaster' language, which seems to be an artifact of poor translation into English from other languages or not having English as a first language (e.g. "a lot of players faced serious emotional outbreaks"; "she downbashed [another player]"; "the last drop for me to leave"). The intended meaning does come across, and what is crystal-clear is that many of these (female) players are very angry about how this has been handled, and they should be listened to and this shouldn't be downplayed. (There does seem to have been some internal arguing among the players as well, unfortunately.)
Let's hope the provisions for Astana (and for any future events) are handled better.