Sunday 7 October 2012

When is a city not a city?

FIDE have announced the details of the 2012 World Cities Championship, although it doesn't seem to have that much to do with cities. The event will be held in Al-Ain, UAE (as in previous years), but the rules seem to have changed to allow national teams to enter, in the guise of representing cities. Qualification to the 32 team event is also based on national performances (at the Olympiad), with Australia being the qualifier for the Oceania zone.
Normally a national federation would be responsible for organising or selecting a team for such an event, but in the case of Australia, the ACF is taking the usual 'hands off' policy, although they are willing to endorse a self organised team. There is talk of a team being organised nonetheless, and with two of the players  mentioned living in the national capital, then a Canberra team may be striding the world stage.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

How will this work if 10 players want to go?

Kevin Bonham said...

As with much other comment about the ACF posted by the owner of the blog, the claim "the ACF is taking the usual 'hands off' policy, although they are willing to endorse a self organised team" is erroneous or at best premature. Its basis is bound to be the post by me here:

http://chesschat.org/showpost.php?p=344836&postcount=4

but Chesschat posts are not made in an official capacity except where they are explicitly stated to be so, as noted in a very prominent disclaimer here:

http://chesschat.org/announcement.php?f=59&a=13

No policy decision has been formally taken by the ACF yet in the very short time since receiving details of this event. Rather, I just offered a view - based on experience of similar situations where formal notice of event details is received too late to run an organised recruitment or selection process - that we are highly likely to endorse any suitable team that can get its act together in time.

If in such a situation we had 10 players wanting to go and all contacting us at the same time, then we could resolve that in various ways including, for instance, applying the quick selection method (average of FIDE and ACF ratings) to rank applicants. But that is purely hypothetical since the chance of that happening is low.