Hi Egis, I do agree about a "new handbook". But I think that's different than what Michael is envisioning? If I am incorrect, my bad. I would support ANY volunteers who could work towards building a new handbook. However, it's gonna be quite some work, entailing ratifications at meetings like these, etc. My viewpoint is that would be REAL WORK, which we need. However, I do not support creating committees whose main role in life would be "massaging communications". I look back at what I just wrote, and I'm not sure that I've done a good job expressing it, the difference between getting real tangible stuff done, vs. just being involved and thus actually adding to the "slowy slush effect".Originally Posted by Egidijus Zeromskis
I completely disagree with your last point though. I don't remember seeing you there before every round, but for the first three rounds, I repeatedly explained what was happening with some of the ratings, on a microphone to everyone. Maybe I said it too simply to register, but the vast majority of players and parents who approached us between rounds seemed to understand what was going on, and offered to assist by providing more recent rating references. Some people (well maybe one) refused to accept what was going on. There were even other conspiracy theories that I was accused of onsite that haven't made it to ChessTalk yet. But I have a limited amount of "up time" while recovering from an emergency surgery, so I'm sure as heck not going to spend it trying to convince anyone who thinks something was done wrong. By the way, one of the challenges with using the most recent ratings is that it became apparent that in many rating systems, posting results will often backdate to the tournament date, which adds an extra layer of required checking. For example, if two events on a Thursday get rated on Friday and next Monday respectfully, they still show up with Thursday dates.
