East Devon Open, 23-25 February

[NickFaulks]

Please get your own house in order. I appreciate that you may not be able to do that until 2020 / 2021.

Why then? As you know, the 40 move rule was expected to disappear in 2016, with the support of a majority of QC council, but narrowly survived as a result of lobbying by senior English arbiters. Are we expecting them to change their views?

The four hour rule for top players is different. FIDE has twice made efforts to have elite games played with faster time limits and was on each occasion criticised, not least in England, for trying to destroy chess. The quality of the games tended to support this. There are those who would like a third go, but I would be sorry if you were among them.

[David Sedgwick]

Please get your own house in order. I appreciate that you may not be able to do that until 2020 / 2021.

Why then? As you know, the 40 move rule was expected to disappear in 2016, with the support of a majority of QC council, but narrowly survived as a result of lobbying by senior English arbiters. Are we expecting them to change their views?

No, but they are likely to have less influence.

Others within the ECF, myself included, underestimated the impact that they would have in 2016. We shall be better prepared next time round.

The four hour rule for top players is different. FIDE has twice made efforts to have elite games played with faster time limits and was on each occasion criticised, not least in England, for trying to destroy chess. The quality of the games tended to support this. There are those who would like a third go, but I would be sorry if you were among them.

With all due espect to them. players rated 2200 are not top players.

It would be a considerable help, and a good compromise, if rating limit for the four hour rule were raised to 2500, the mimimum rating for the GM title.

[Brian Towers]

It would be a considerable help, and a good compromise, if rating limit for the four hour rule were raised to 2500, the mimimum rating for the GM title.

Oy!
Patzers are people too!
Some of us appreciate the longer time controls that apply when organizers want to allow 2200+ players to enter their FIDE rated tournaments.

[Roger de Coverly]

Some of us appreciate the longer time controls that apply when organizers want to allow 2200+ players to enter their FIDE rated tournaments.

FIDE have come up with the curious compromise that if you have sessions of less than four hours, you can allow players rated above 2200 to enter and still rate the tournament, provide you don't rate any of the games involving the players above 2200. The suggestion of moving that threshold to 2500 would mean that a weekender running 3 games on a Saturday could have them all rated (unless someone very good shows up) without forcing a 12 hour day or longer on the rest of the players.

[NickFaulks]

FIDE have come up with the curious compromise that if you have sessions of less than four hours, you can allow players rated above 2200 to enter and still rate the tournament, provide you don't rate any of the games involving the players above 2200.

Why is that curious? It simply reflects the fact that it is not tournaments that are rated, it is games. In theory, a tournament could be reported as a lot of individual single game matches, although there are many reasons why this is not recommended.

[Roger de Coverly]

Why is that curious? It simply reflects the fact that it is not tournaments that are rated, it is games.

You rate the entire population rather than selected members. That's a stronger principle in the ECF system than in Elo ones, where new players are excluded from affecting the ratings of existing players.

[NickFaulks]

You rate the entire population rather than selected members. That's a stronger principle in the ECF system than in Elo ones, where new players are excluded from affecting the ratings of existing players.

Sometimes I play a game that I expect will affect my ECF grade, but I cannot guess what that effect will be. To me that is "curious", although I am not especially troubled by it.

Now that it takes only five games to get a FIDE rating, the information added by including games against players whose strength is estimated from less than that must be very small, and would introduce randomness.

[Roger de Coverly]

Now that it takes only five games to get a FIDE rating, the information added by including games against players whose strength is estimated from less than that must be very small, and would introduce randomness.

K=20 and K=40 for juniors introduced randomness of itself. My benchmark is that a win against a player of equal rating is worth a gain of 10 points, therefore 20 points, sometimes more, are at risk each 4NCL weekend.

[NickFaulks]

K=20 and K=40 for juniors introduced randomness of itself.

I don't mean randomness to mean that you may or may not win. That is normal. I mean by randomness that the ratings of your opponents, if based on only a few games, may not reflect their playing strength.

[Alex Holowczak]

but then the organisers would have to satisfy additional ECF and FIDE requirements.

Which additional ECF requirements? I'm still trying to get to grips with the problems that seem unique to the ECF.

The problems that may be unique to England are that organisers do not modernise their events, and arbiters are not necessarily suitably skilled.

One of the issues is that English organisers and arbiters still do a lot of their tournaments manually. They'll be able to find a grader to do the grading file for them in a spreadsheet once they post the results to them, but who do they ask to do the rating file? That's a skills shortage caused by years of prominent arbiters failing to embrace tournament administration by computer, often because of a belief that the British pairing system was better than the FIDE pairing system. While I think I've succeeded in getting the British organised in a more efficient way than it was when I first got involved, many other events are still wedded to the old-fashioned ways.

In continental Europe, if not the rest of the world, I gather that the vast majority chessplayers are juniors, stretching up to maybe about 40-50 years old. In England, using the 4NCL Congresses as my sample, the mean age at tournaments in Yorkshire is about 50, and in the South East, about 40; but the median is normally higher because the mean is distorted by the juniors. I would expect this to be significantly higher than many other countries.

The extreme South West is a good example of this, particularly Paignton. You can only normally enter by post. Their time control remains a guillotine finish. The results are often difficult to find online. How many other events in continental Europe are organised like that? It's very old-fashioned, and it would surprise me if Exeter was different. Paignton is FIDE-rated, but only after the now traditional e-mail grovelling to you because they forgot to register it.

I think if an English organiser was told "You could FIDE-rate your event if you do this, this and this", most organisers would say "What's the point?" See David Sedgwick's post with regard to the time controls as an example of that attitude, which based on conversations I've had in the past, is widely held. As you rightly observed, I tried to argue in favour of the motion that would help solve that particular problem, only for some of the arbiters I referred to earlier in this post to argue against it. I suspect everywhere else just changed their time limits and got on with life.

In my opinion, it's old-fashionedness, or perhaps closed-mindedness, or a mix of the two. I'm sure it's caused by the fact that our demographics are different from those elsewhere, and that may be the thing that sets England apart.

It's certainly not membership that's the issue - the 4NCL Congresses tend to get very high numbers in Yorkshire, and the top two sections of those are FIDE-rated. Yorkshire is not noted for its overwhelming ECF support when it comes to membership, so if it isn't a problem in Yorkshire, it shouldn't be a problem elsewhere.

[NickFaulks]

often because of a belief that the British pairing system was better than the FIDE pairing system

A belief I share, but the difference is not sufficient to compensate for the lack of a computerised version.

[Alex Holowczak]

often because of a belief that the British pairing system was better than the FIDE pairing system

A belief I share, but the difference is not sufficient to compensate for the lack of a computerised version.

The British pairing rules, with their local variations, were apparently not very easy to program due to the number of discretionary factors. The world moved beyond that in the 15 or so years while that wasn't resolved.

[Roger de Coverly]

The British pairing rules, with their local variations, were apparently not very easy to program due to the number of discretionary factors.

I had always presumed that was the point. For Norms anyway that you could give players the opponents they needed with a reasonable amount of deniability.

The "old" way of doing Swiss pairings was to do them randomly. That should have been straightforward enough to mechanise. A couple of key points being that you sort the top half by rating and randomly pair their opposition. You prove it wasn't fixed by using pseudo-random numbers where the same key always produces the same sequence.

If it's a "problem" that English Congress participants are getting on in years, it's a reflection of the success of the BCF in generating lifetime players in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s. Arguably it lost the plot from about the 1993 match onwards.

[Richard Bates]

It is almost certainly true that any organiser in the UK wanting to run a weekend tournament with a starting point that they seek to run a 'prestigious' event and attract a lot of strong players to the Open should NOT FIDE rate it. In FIDE rating terms such tournaments effectively offer almost no upsides and potentially very large downsides. With the added issue that the pursuit of prizes and FIDE rating points will invariably conflict with each other. People who point to the 4NCL congress model as a counter to this are, I think, ignoring the likelihood that any stronger player entries to these are generally in spite of FIDE rating, rather than because of it. And usually based around the starting point of the offering of conditions of various sorts, that most regular weekend tournaments don't.

The ECF should bear this in mind in the context of its current policy of strongly pushing FIDE rating for weekend tournaments, most obviously through its British Championship qualifying Grand Prix.

[David Sedgwick]

It is almost certainly true that any organiser in the UK wanting to run a weekend tournament with a starting point that they seek to run a 'prestigious' event and attract a lot of strong players to the Open should NOT FIDE rate it. In FIDE rating terms such tournaments effectively offer almost no upsides and potentially very large downsides. With the added issue that the pursuit of prizes and FIDE rating points will invariably conflict with each other. People who point to the 4NCL congress model as a counter to this are, I think, ignoring the likelihood that any stronger player entries to these are generally in spite of FIDE rating, rather than because of it. And usually based around the starting point of the offering of conditions of various sorts, that most regular weekend tournaments don't.

The ECF should bear this in mind in the context of its current policy of strongly pushing FIDE rating for weekend tournaments, most obviously through its British Championship qualifying Grand Prix.

Your posts are nearly always well argued and this one is no exception.

Sadly, I fear that it will lead to Alex Holowczak classifying you as a dinosaur, despite your relative youth.