21-12-2011, 01:05 AM
Andrew -
a) It's not sad, no. We're talking a major investment of time here - being a perpetual student I'm not sure what the average annual holiday allowance is for people with real jobs, but I'm sure that two and a half weeks takes a significant chunk out of it. That can easily be the difference between being able to go on holiday somewhere with the family and not. I'm sure we'd love all of our top players to be absolutely focused on chess at the expense of all other things. Week-long tournaments in Scotland, among other things, are shorter and don't necessarily involve long separations from loved ones.
b) Dunno, but I'm not sure taking a narrowly economistic view of chess affairs is going to be helpful. I do know that when I was young and starting out, I loved reading the Olympiad reports and used to hope I'd be there one day (seem to have gone slightly astray since. Ah well). I'm a bit worried that there's this attitude of 'let's focus on chess for the future', and then when the strong youngsters turn 18 we focus on the next generation, and so on, until we've got a lot of 2200-strength poker players. I don't think it's a bad thing at all for junior chess that we send out the message that, if you become really good, the Scottish chess community will support you at least to a limited extent.
c) I'm not sure why you think de-prioritising fielding a team containing our GMs is going to help with that...
The shortage of funding is an issue, and I'm not sure what we're going to do about it - though we still haven't lost the grant yet have we? - but I doubt that cutting the support to our top players is the best way to solve it. Essentially, if funding cuts materialise, this is a problem we will only be able to solve - if we discount the possibility of fairy-godmother sponsors, which may or may not be wise - by somehow getting more publicity/marketing/media interest going, and I think that fielding strong international teams is likely to help rather than hinder such efforts.
a) It's not sad, no. We're talking a major investment of time here - being a perpetual student I'm not sure what the average annual holiday allowance is for people with real jobs, but I'm sure that two and a half weeks takes a significant chunk out of it. That can easily be the difference between being able to go on holiday somewhere with the family and not. I'm sure we'd love all of our top players to be absolutely focused on chess at the expense of all other things. Week-long tournaments in Scotland, among other things, are shorter and don't necessarily involve long separations from loved ones.
b) Dunno, but I'm not sure taking a narrowly economistic view of chess affairs is going to be helpful. I do know that when I was young and starting out, I loved reading the Olympiad reports and used to hope I'd be there one day (seem to have gone slightly astray since. Ah well). I'm a bit worried that there's this attitude of 'let's focus on chess for the future', and then when the strong youngsters turn 18 we focus on the next generation, and so on, until we've got a lot of 2200-strength poker players. I don't think it's a bad thing at all for junior chess that we send out the message that, if you become really good, the Scottish chess community will support you at least to a limited extent.
c) I'm not sure why you think de-prioritising fielding a team containing our GMs is going to help with that...
The shortage of funding is an issue, and I'm not sure what we're going to do about it - though we still haven't lost the grant yet have we? - but I doubt that cutting the support to our top players is the best way to solve it. Essentially, if funding cuts materialise, this is a problem we will only be able to solve - if we discount the possibility of fairy-godmother sponsors, which may or may not be wise - by somehow getting more publicity/marketing/media interest going, and I think that fielding strong international teams is likely to help rather than hinder such efforts.