Tuesday 11 November 2008

The leaving of Leeds

Do a search for 'chess' in Google news and most of the stories are about teams heading off to the Dresden Olympiad. For the PNG team most of the team have been traveling since last week, although the final leg of the journey starts tomorrow.
For an island nation surprisingly most of us are arriving by train. In my case it will a total of 25 hours of travel, starting in Leeds and ending in Dresden via London, Brussels and Berlin. Once we do get there sorting out accommodation may be more involved than first thought.
The organisers have placed the PNG team in the cheap and cheerful Ibis hotel, which seems sensible enough if you assume that the quality of accommodation and the average rating of the team is directly related. However this apparently isn't the case, and it depends more on when you registered. Unfortunately for the PNG team we were probably too efficient, requesting our accommodation on the very first day we were requested too. It appears that the organisers then managed to lose all our data (possibly due to a redesign of their registration form) and only re-requested the information as the registration deadline approached. This meant we went from the head of the queue to the end of it.
I guess the lesson we have learned is "it doesn't pay to be more efficient than the Germans"

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