hamish olson Wrote:Lots of interesting points on this thread.
Think the idea of giving places based on chances to score above 50% has a lot of merit (but there are a hell of a lot of technical issues - what happens if none of the players who don't get the funding from CS but are the players that Fide is technically giving the free accomadation to play (or if they try to claim the accomadation directly off Fide, complaining about what we are doing.) That said, I do think that we should probably try to implement this if it is possible. For example when I was u18 etc then I only got my selections because the likes of Andrew Mcclement, Johnny Scott & Shivan were all born a bit less than a year after me (feel free to point out if this is wrong - I don't seem to have a good track record with age differences on this forum!) and I'm not really sure that's fair (they were a year younger but 200-400 points better...) but Fide do not like players playing up an age group unless they are exceptional at European level. Not really sure if I'd have been too chuffed if I'd been asked to go and pay much more purely so that someone else can get a funded place mind!

I do think we need to be very very clear that these events are brutal - no two ways about it, the world youth it's viable to get a good score with just a couple of upsets (though still far from easy) but the Euro Youth in my experience was really really tough and I don't know how I'd have coped if I'd been good enough to be selected before I was 17/18. I think that these events had a lot of effects on my chess. They were a very strong motivation to get better, both to get selected and then to get strong enough - I was 1667 when selected but put in a lot of work in between losing to a 9 years old Kai Pannwitz (who doesn't even remember the fact that he's beaten me!) and the scottish champs a month or so before the Euro youth in Bulgaria. As for the events themselves, playing 9 games against 2200ish opposition when you are 1900 going on 2000 cannot fail to help your chess if you can deal with the fact that you are losing most games but it is quite tough psychologically, it's not like a weekender where you might have an unpleasant couple of days (0/5 at Edinburgh congress challengers springs to mind!) - this is nigh on 2 weeks often in roasting conditions getting hammered by kids your own age ( not something a lot kids selected to represent Scotland are used to). Not an easy experience when I was old enough to vote, not quite sure how well the average 8 year old is going to handle it and I think we need to try and make sure we are not putting off more kids than we are motivating, but there are no easy answers, I certainly gained far more than I lost but I have always been good at dealing with setbacks (0/5 in first challengers, losing to 9 year olds...) and was quite a bit older than most first time internationalists.

Alan Tate's comments a year or so ago also really hit the nail on the head with another issue, in order to deserve all this money from CS these kids really have to work their socks off to try and be the absolute best they can be,the top players from other countries certainly will be - perhaps selections should be made further in advance and clear targets for the amount of work to be put in made. I appreciate that these kids are just kids and they have exams and social lives and all that but if you are representing Scotland then surely you should love the game and, yes exams have to take priority over chess and social interaction is very important too but Call of Duty and stuff like that? Can't claim to be perfect myself in this regard (though never had an Xbox or Playstation) but I certainly put in a lot of work in the 3 or 4 seasons between being J14 600 and World Youth 2012 Brazil 5/9 (but then I didn't have any social life!)
I am currently in France just now (mostly interrailing) playing in a very small, fairly weak (but fide rated like all french tournaments!) weekender.After my pretty quick game this afternoon against an1800 who played 1.g4d5 2.h4 d53.Bg2 against me (and didn't get down to less time than he started with until he was dead lost) I spent quite a lot of time communicating (in my broken french and his broken English) with the tournament organiser.
He was saying that they have people teaching chess in all the schools in Hyeres (I don't think he meant actually classes as much as coaching in the clubs and running clubs and extra curricular etc.). I ask him whether most other cities do this and he said they do. We looked at the Fide lists for France and for Scotland, France has 9000 active fide players, and judging by Hyeres it has a fifth more players with national elos. The single
biggest thing we can do as a whole is get involved with the schools more I think, and get the sheer numbers up.
Tomorrow I'm playing one of the two other players on 2/2, a 13 year old boy rated 1600 (like I say it's a small tournament...). The reason he is playing here and not in the French junior championships going on just now (which has 1300 players btw!) is that he does not make the top 100 for his age!

More online coaching to improve the existing crop of juniors obviously is useful, I just think we also need to be aiming even higher (easy for me to say these things, where's the money coming from, in Hyeres the council of the region funds it, if only...) Apologies for any rambling and also the formatting, writing this on my phone as no laptop.