12-09-2017, 12:50 PM
You are the fortunate captain of a club team: Rowson, Greet, McNab, Shaw, Arakhamia-Grant. They've been a bit inactive in FIDE classical chess over the last year but you know that they are all keen to commit to winning the upcoming SNCL for you, have all, in fact, played as much as they could in the last six months or so, including rapidplays, blitz and online games. And that most of them have also been involved in coaching and training and in some cases even worked on books that required them to put in numerous hours of deeply intensive database and engine-based research and analysis on the games of some of the greatest players in the world.
You don't, however, think that they meet your recent activity requirements so you drop them. A new club activity rule suggests (even predicts) that they simply can't be expected to make a better fist of becoming Scottish champions than your best 1900-2200 players (you are quite a strong club), who have played sufficient FIDE rated games in the last 6 months or so. You say to the unsurprisingly puzzled and chastened, erstwhile as keen as mustard, top-rated players that they should simply have played more recent FIDE-rated games because the rule, which is inviolate, simply requires them to have so re-arranged their busy lifestyles in ways that it believes they simply 'ought to'. They in turn ask you to arrange a training match to help prepare their less experienced colleagues for their forthcoming battles and win 5-0.
As a selector do you begin to have doubts about the recently introduced club activity rule? Do you begin to fear that it perhaps contains an apparently undue bias towards irrationality away from more duly balanced discretionary selection principles. Discuss!? Certainly re-think!?
By the way, if any change is of value, I have always long liked the idea that the Scottish champion should have a right of refusal of a place (but not to a specific board) on the Olympiad or Euro Championship team that is next due in the period beginning, say three months after winning the title. I think that there really is a case for this that might well be broadly supported (George Neave, above, appears to approve). Win-win all round, not least for the likely interest that aspiring players will show to the Scottish Championship!?
You don't, however, think that they meet your recent activity requirements so you drop them. A new club activity rule suggests (even predicts) that they simply can't be expected to make a better fist of becoming Scottish champions than your best 1900-2200 players (you are quite a strong club), who have played sufficient FIDE rated games in the last 6 months or so. You say to the unsurprisingly puzzled and chastened, erstwhile as keen as mustard, top-rated players that they should simply have played more recent FIDE-rated games because the rule, which is inviolate, simply requires them to have so re-arranged their busy lifestyles in ways that it believes they simply 'ought to'. They in turn ask you to arrange a training match to help prepare their less experienced colleagues for their forthcoming battles and win 5-0.
As a selector do you begin to have doubts about the recently introduced club activity rule? Do you begin to fear that it perhaps contains an apparently undue bias towards irrationality away from more duly balanced discretionary selection principles. Discuss!? Certainly re-think!?
By the way, if any change is of value, I have always long liked the idea that the Scottish champion should have a right of refusal of a place (but not to a specific board) on the Olympiad or Euro Championship team that is next due in the period beginning, say three months after winning the title. I think that there really is a case for this that might well be broadly supported (George Neave, above, appears to approve). Win-win all round, not least for the likely interest that aspiring players will show to the Scottish Championship!?