Wednesday, October 21, 2009

FIDE Tax on Tardiness

Has the FIDE Presidential Board lost its mind?

Last week, the executive Board met in Halkidiki, Greece. The report on that meeting by Herman Hamers (available for download from the ECF website) notes the following discussion item:

A proposal by the Presidential Board that players who fail to appear at the start of a game, not only lose the game by default, but also give them a penalty of €500 (a second time €1.000 and a third time €2.000) met a lot of opposition and was taken back. Possibly it will return next year in the General Assembly.

Are they kidding? A €500 fine for being late? Heaven help the poorer teams who can barely scrape together their air fares!

Feel free to vent or say what you want here or over on the ECF forum where discussion was sparked off by John Saunders. As John said in that thread, "The zero default time rule is bad enough without FIDE trying to make money out of defaults. The fact that they should even propose such an absurd penalty shows that they are completely out of touch with most of the world's competition players."

Too right!

5 comments:

Garvin said...

Well this policy would certainly be an entry killer if there ever was one.

Dear players, please play our high entry fees and we should warn you, if you are even one minute late for any of your games, then that is another 500 euro in our kitty.

I do wonder sometimes if some of these proposals are just meant to stir up some discussion, or to get better proposals out of others to use later.

Anonymous said...

This proposition is simply idiotic. I wouldn't bother worrying about it though - there is simply no chance it will be put into practice.

Kevin Bonham said...

Utter lunacy.

Peter Long said...

I think a case can be made for zero start - to bring chess in line with other sports, accommodate media, sponsors, etc.
The fine part is however certainly not only ridiculous (as forfeit is already sufficient punishment and furthermore there is a chance that if indeed the sponsor/organiser was offended there would be no future invitation), but completely unenforceable and certainly likely to be inconsistent with laws in many places.
In China recently a FIDE official who was also the Chief Arbiter took special delight in enforcing this rule as evidenced from his publishing it on the FIDE website so I am surprised a pound of flesh is also being demanded!

Anonymous said...

Let's put a different slant on this:

How many players would be prepared to pay a 500 Euro (800 AUD? guess) entry fee to a tournament if it meant a better spread of prizes?

Would such players take more time to prepare for their games and would they put up a better fight during their games?

Would such players then expect higher (professional) tournament operating standards?

If prizemoney offered for a tournament exceeds a certain level can players be charged with fraud or obtaining property by deception if they are found to have done something unethical to obtain that prize?

(Just thought I'd throw that one in as I've wondered if that might be the case thus prize funds are kept deliberately low.