Summary
The five main topics of the letter are
-
Accommodation during the last European Championships in Silivri
(Turkey)
This was held in June 2003, and the players were forced, as a prerequisite
for their participation, to stay in organiser-designated hotels. The ACP
calls on the ECU to explain why the players were overcharged and to make
sure that in the future all participants are allowed to choose their accommodation
and will not have to pay more than the normal rates in the hotels.
-
The forthcoming Women’s European Championship in Dresden
(March 2004)
Since the next FIDE Women’s World Championship has not been announced
it seems pointless to declare the Dresden event the qualifier for the next
cycle, when the current one is nowhere near completion.
-
Qualifiers for the FIDE Men's Championship
During the Men’s Championship in Silivri a tie-break was arranged
to determine the final qualifiers for the FIDE World Championship. Now
the ECU President Boris Kutin has nominated two apparently random players
(Baadur Jobava from Georgia and Kivanc Haznedaroglu from Turkey) to play
in the World Championship. He doesn’t have the power to do so, and
makes the tie-break session in Silivri pointless. The ACP demands that
the two nominated players be removed and the tie-break candidates be allowed
to play in their stead.
-
Conditions during the European Club Cup
The playing conditions in the Rethymnon (Crete) tournament in September
2003 were “simply unacceptable and must not be repeated”. Also
the time control in the men’s event was changed from one supported
by the majority of the clubs to the one these clubs were voting against.
- European Team Championships in Sweden and Greece
The ECU has awarded the 2005 and 2007 European Team Championships to organizers
from Sweden (Gothenburg) and Greece (Crete) respectively, in violation of
the bidding procedure, ECU statutes and the ECU tournament rules. The ACP
demands that the whole bidding procedure be repeated and conducted in the
proper way.
Links
Open Letter from the ACP to the ECU board
Paris, 11th of February 2004
Dear Mr Boris Kutin, President of the ECU,
Dear members of the ECU Board,
To start with, the ACP would like to thank the ECU for the invitation to
take part in your Board Meeting that will be held in St Vincent (Italy) on
14-15 February 2004. Unfortunately, none of the ACP Board members is available
on those dates, as all are active players and thus already committed to various
tournaments. Nevertheless, the issues we wish to discuss with you are pressing
and we should not postpone them until your next Board meeting. Since all chess
professionals are concerned by these issues, we have decided to present them
to you in an open letter. For the sake of transparency in our dialogue, we
would kindly ask you to reply to us in the same way.
Without further ado, we will now proceed with the five main topics that are
foremost on our agenda in respect to the ECU.
1) The accommodation problem during the last Individual European Championships
held in Silivri (Turkey), June 2003
Our position in this important matter has not changed since our previous press
release, dating from the 7th of November 2003. Unfortunately, all the questions
asked in the press release have to this day remained unanswered by the ECU,
we thus feel compelled to formulate them once again:
On what objective grounds are the participants forced to stay in a hotel designated
by the organizer, considering that all accommodation expenses are carried by
the players themselves? The reason given in the ECU Tournament Rules (point
1.13.6) strikes us as particularly shallow:
“In order to hold the ECU competitions in a proper manner and to
be in permanent close contact with all participants, official hotels have to
be appointed. Each participant is obliged to stay in one of the official hotels.
Players not fulfilling this condition are not allowed to take part.”
One is truly left guessing here as to what exactly entails “holding
the ECU competitions in a proper manner”, while the necessity and purpose
of “being in permanent close contact” are both rather puzzling,
to say the least. If contact between the organizer and the players is what
is meant here, then surely in this day and age of advanced technology, participants
need not remain within such close range of the organizing committee as to prevent
them from staying in any hotel they see fit. This unfounded and unjust rule
is at the root of the problem. In essence, it is simply a violation of basic
commercial rights, in this case the consumer’s freedom of choice.
Things became worse in Silivri, when it appeared that the players had to pay
higher prices for their rooms than regular tourists, as was repeatedly demonstrated
in our previous letters. The necessity and purpose of keeping “all participants
in permanent close contact” suddenly acquire an entirely different meaning,
i.e. that the organisers abused their position and charged more for the rooms
than they should have, a policy not quite in keeping with the ECU Tournament
Rules from the same article 1.13.6, which further stipulate that “The
room prices should not exceed the normal rates”.
We do not have any objections against organizers making a profit but why does
it have to be at the participants’ expense? The ECU has argued several
times that the expenses of some players were covered by the national federations.
This may be true for a happy few but does not take into account the large number
of players who had to stay home because they could not benefit from such a
support and for whom the costs were too prohibitive.
We would like to get an answer as to why the ECU Tournament Rules
were not respected in Silivri 2003 and as a consequence, players were charged
more than the normal rate. We strongly demand that in the future, several official
hotels are offered to choose from and that participants are ultimately left
free to stay wherever they wish.
2) The forthcoming Women’s Individual European Championship in Dresden,
March 2004
All of the above remarks concerning the accommodation problem are obviously
valid for the forthcoming Women’s Individual European Championship in
Dresden next March. On top of that, we would like to remind you that in the
absence of any announced dates and venue for the next FIDE Women’s Individual
World Championship to be held in 2004, it appears quite pointless to announce
that the Dresden event will be a qualifier to a following edition of the FIDE
Women’s World Championship. How can players qualify for a future FIDE
World Championship when the current cycle is nowhere near completion?
We ask you to cancel the qualifying status of the next Women’s
Individual European Championship to a future FIDE Women’s World Championship.
It cannot be justified when the current FIDE WWC keeps being postponed and
may not take place in a foreseeable future.
3) The attribution of qualifying places to the FIDE World Championship in
the ECU European Individual Men’s Championship in Silivri (June 2003)
According to the World Chess Championship 2003/2004 Regulations, a total
of 46 qualifying places to the FIDE World Championship were given to the European
Continental and Zonal Championships. As there are no Zonal Tournaments in Europe
anymore and 5 players had already qualified from the 2002 European Championship
held in Batumi, 41 players should have qualified from the 2003 European Championship
in Silivri. For unfathomable reasons, 2 players have been personally nominated
by the President of the ECU, Mr Boris Kutin, in order to play in the next FIDE
World Championship. These players are Baadur Jobava from Georgia and Kivanc
Haznedaroglu from Turkey. Why precisely these players were hand-picked has
not been explained, but that is a moot point, since there is no article in
the World Chess Championship 2003/2004 Regulations which allows the ECU President
to directly seed players into the FIDE World Championship. The only person
who enjoys such a privilege is the FIDE President himself, who nominates eight
players. As can easily be checked in the list of qualifiers, however, he has
not handed out these places to anyone yet and all eight places are still at
his disposal. This means that he has in no way transferred his right to the
ECU President. During the last European Championship in Silivri, the number
of players who scored 8 points or more from thirteen games was 46, including
5 players who were already qualified by rating to the FIDE World Championship.
In an ironic twist of fate, it therefore turned out that, had the ECU President
not taken away two qualifying spots from the European Championship in favour
of Mr Jobava and Mr Haznedaroglu, no tie-break matches would have been necessary!
At that time, however, the participants were not aware of the detailed regulations
and were just told that they had to battle for 39 places instead of 41.
After the last round, this meant that Alexei Fedorov, Sergey Tiviakov, Ernesto
Inarkiev and Andrei Istratescu had to play a tie-break session among themselves
to determine the two players that would not qualify.
These four participants refused to play their tie-break matches, were disqualified
altogether from the FIDE World Championship by the ECU and eventually replaced
by Mateusz Bartel (European Champion under 18) and Aleksander Delchev (the
leader of European Grand Prix).
We have gone at some length to describe this issue in order to demonstrate
that:
a) The ECU President was not allowed by the World Chess Championship 2003/2004
Regulations to nominate both Mr Jobava and Mr Haznedaroglu to participate
in the next FIDE World Championship;
b) The four above-mentioned players who refused to play their tie-break
matches should all have been qualified and should not have been asked to
participate in a tie-break.
We urge you to consider qualifying A.Fedorov, S.Tiviakov, E.Inarkiev
and A.Istratescu to the next FIDE World Championship, on the grounds that,
had the ECU not taken away two places from the European Championship without
any valid reason, all of the four above-mentioned players would have been qualified.
4) Conditions and rules of the European Club Cup
The last European Club Cup (ECC) organized in Rethymnon (Crete), in late
September 2003, was affected by several problems of an organizational nature.
We will briefly go over them:
a) An abrupt last-minute change of hotel accommodation, and even tournament
location, for all women teams and numerous men teams, due to a mix-up in the
hotel reservations. This was possibly not the direct responsibility of the
ECU, it may have been the consequence of the hotel management’s sloppy
work. Nevertheless, it affected the playing conditions for many players. If
the ECU has an agreement with a large hotel and brings in several hundred guests,
it should be entitled to a proper reservation service.
b) Unacceptable playing conditions for the men’s event: the players
were competing in a very cramped playing hall, after four hours of play the
heat and lack of air were at times hardly bearable.
c) The current format of the Club Cup has been criticized by a number of
team sponsors and captains: the event involves considerable costs for the
teams for a low return in terms of publicity. The media coverage in Rethymnon
was very scarce, despite the participation of some of the world’s very
best players.
Rules about the proper registration in advance of teams and their players
have once more been ignored in Rethymnon: Garry Kasparov was not even on the
official list of participants on the eve of the first round. If players can
show up at the last minute and still be part of a team, then why does the ECU
compel all clubs to submit a list of players that cannot be changed at least
one month before the event? We do understand that Garry Kasparov’s participation
was very important for the prestige of the European Club Cup, however, his
inclusion should not have been at the expense of the ECU’s own rules
that are applicable to all participants.
According to the minutes of the ECU General Assembly held in Plovdiv in October
2003, a vote was passed on the time control to be used at the next European
Club Cup in both the men’s and women’s events. The adopted time
control was the new FIDE control of 90 minutes plus a 30 second increment for
the whole game. We’d like to remind the ECU that a poll was organized
just prior to the first round in Rethymnon. The result for the men’s
competition (the women did adopt the 90 minutes time control) showed that team
captains and participants were largely in favour of the previous classical
FIDE time-control of 100 minutes for 40 moves, followed by 50 minutes for 20
moves and 10 minutes for the rest of the game, with a 30 second increment from
the first move. Since this time control was eventually applied for the men’s
event, why has the ECU ignored this fact and changed the time control to the
one the players were voting against? Another question arises in that respect:
on what grounds was a poll organized during the Captains’ Meeting? The
ECU Tournament Rules do not foresee such a possibility and clearly stipulate
in F.5.3.5 “The rate of play has to be notified by the organisers in
the letter of invitation.”
There is one more remark which we would like to make regarding the dates of
the 2004 European Club Cup. As the Olympiad is scheduled from the 14th until
the 31st of October, it would be logical that the ECC be played earlier than
the scheduled dates, i.e. between the 2nd and 10th of October. This would leave
some breathing space for the players between two important and difficult events.
Summing up: We would like to have an answer as to why the rules of
the European Club Cup regarding team line-ups were not followed in 2003. For
the next edition of the ECC, we strongly ask you to stick to these rules. Moreover,
we draw your attention to the fact that playing conditions, such as those imposed
on the participants of the men’s competition in Rethymnon 2003, are simply
unacceptable and must not be repeated. At the same time, we don’t understand
why the time control in the men’s event has been changed from one supported
by the majority of the clubs to the one they were voting against. Finally,
we suggest that the European Club Cup in 2004 should start at least one week
earlier than scheduled.
5) The attribution of the European Team Championships to Sweden in 2005 and
Greece in 2007.
According to the minutes of the ECU General Assembly in Plovdiv, the attribution
of the 2005 and 2007 European Team Championships (ETC) to organizers from Sweden
and Greece respectively, violated the bidding procedure, the ECU Statutes and
the ECU Tournament Rules. Since all members of the ECU Board are no doubt informed
of that matter, we will limit ourselves to outlining the problem that arose.
The two bids for the 2005 European Team Championship were initially emanating
from Gothenburg (Sweden) and Crete (Greece). Both bids did not fit the timeframe
allotted by the ECU in its Tournament Rules about the European Team Championship,
which must be held between the 15th of October and the 30th of November 2005.
Instead of asking the bidders to modify their offers accordingly, the President
of the ECU proposed to vote for a “package deal” of having the
European Team Championship in Sweden 2005 and one in Greece in 2007. What followed
is hard to understand: although this proposal was for many reasons in complete
contradiction with the bidding procedure, the ECU Tournament Rules and the
ECU Statutes, and despite the fact that Greece had not even offered to stage
the 2007 ETC in the first place, the members approved the President’s
motion by vote.
As a result, the 2007 ETC has already been granted to Greece even before the
bidding procedure could begin. This means no other organizer was given a chance
to submit a bid for 2007, a particularly absurd decision, given that the Greek
organizers only had an offer for 2005.
We strongly ask you to follow your own rules and statutes in attributing
your events to hosting organizers. Since the bidding regulations, the ECU Tournament
Rules and the ECU Statutes were all ignored during the vote, we suggest that
the whole bidding procedure for both the 2005 and 2007 European Team Championships
be repeated and held in a proper way.
Sincerely,
THE ACP BOARD
