Today Double Rooks issues a desperate SOS call to the country’s chess community to rescue the sport from the ineptitude, insensitivity and internal dissension of the T&T Chess Association. Since the last general election a year ago, the Association’s tenure has been marked by a number of unfortunate incidents, most notably the resignations of at least two disenchanted management committee members, the unwarranted suspension of treasurer Russell Smith and the open and unseemly wrangling between prominent committee members. But certainly, in DR’s view, the Association has brought management of the sport to its lowest level by the inexcusable insult it has inflicted on Knights Chess Club, the oldest, most reputable and certainly the most valuable of the T&TCA members. The logical expectation was that the Association would appreciate and fully support the initiative taken by Knights to honour its longest serving president Lucio Araujo, one of the unsung heroes of the sport. But instead of earnestly facilitating the club’s effort to hold its Lucio Araujo Invitational Tournament, another progressive venture by Knights, the Association chose instead to frustrate the club by fiddle faddling with its perfectly reasonable request to have the event Fide rated.
The tournament, a round-robin contest with ten players, several of them being members of Knights, was played at the Federation Park home of president Louis Wiltshire from September 11 to October 15, 2011. The ground breaking event proved quite successful inspite of the difficulties presented by the curfew that attended the state of emergency between September and December last year. The unfortunate aspect about this special tournament, however, is the fact that although the request for Fide rating was made to the Association since August 12, a month before the contest started, Knights is still awaiting, some ten months after, a definitive reply from the Association!. The essential question that members of the concerned chess community must now ask is why was Knights, a club that has given so much to the sport over some four decades, treated with such officious contempt over a perfectly straightforward, logical and legitimate request. Having conducted the year’s two major open club tournaments at the Rhand building, Knights was reluctant to impose upon the generosity of the credit union to provide the venue for a third open, and so the club decided to hold an invitational round-robin to honour its late pioneering president at the home of its current president.
Unexpectedly, however, Knights found itself fighting a bizarre rearguard action against the T&TCA in its effort to have the tournament Fide rated. Shortly after placing the club’s request on the Fide Web site as the first step, the Association informed the club that, by a majority decision, the management committee did not favour the Fide rating of closed tournaments. In reply, Knights presented the T&TCA with a number of arguments why its request should be granted, including a number of local precedents plus the fact that closed round-robin tournaments, now held globally, had become the preferred way to gain ratings and titles. But most vital of all, the club pointed out that its invitational tournament had met all the Fide criteria for its rating. This easily verifiable fact alone, of course, should have dissolved whatever objections the Association may have coughed up. But in its own wisdom, the T&TCA preferred to ignore what the world chess body has to say about its own rating system and, particularly, its view of the Knight’s request. Instead, the Association announced its decision to appoint a committee, including member clubs, to discuss the FIDE rating of closed invitational tournaments.
If the T&TCA’s insult to Knights wasn’t so grievous it would be quite laughable. Ten months later, nobody seems to know whether such a meeting was ever held. The club at the centre of the issue has certainly never heard of it!
Double Rooks, however, is not despairing. Hopefully, the T&TCA will manage to hold this meeting before its AGM later this month in order to enlighten Knights and Fide about its considered view on the rating of closed tournaments. The world chess body would certainly be grateful to have the T&TCA’s findings. Not unexpectedly, Knights was subject to the final humiliation when someone in the Association ordered the removal of the Lucio Araujo Invitational from the FIDE web-site sometime between October 8 and 15, 2011. As a telling postscript to this depressing episode, DR gives the reply made by relevant FIDE officials to Knights request. Mikko Markkula virtually speaks for them all: “There is no reason in the regulations to prevent the tournament, even if it is an invitational round-robin, from being rated. It is up to the local federation to decide whether a tournament is registered and sent to rating. “I see there is some kind of dispute inside your federation. You should solve the problem by yourselves.” The facts of this sad episode speaks for themselves. They tell not only of a nonchalant and lackadaisical approach by the T&TCA executive to important matters but, more disastrously, of its failure to appreciate its own essential mandate, that is to serve the interests of its member clubs. Indeed, the Association’s strange inability to appreciate the standard bearer among its members and its unparalleled contribution to the sport plus the contemptuous rejection of the club’s legitimate request amount to an unforgivable insult.
Double Rooks expects that responsible members of the Association would be outraged by this episode and they would move to place the sport they love into more enlightened and progressive hands when the hour of decision arrives. They should also want to do it for Lucio.
-Carl Jacobs
Source: www.guardian.co.tt