June 19, 2008 --Lawrence Day

[chesspotzer]

Hello All,

Willian Yuan has formally accepted the Women's Team co-captaincy
arrangement where he will handle technical matters and Natalia will
organize the team meetings and line-ups by consensus or voting. This
means the Women's is now set except for Michael collecting a couple
of
birthdays..

For the Men's, Igor Zugic has suggested that I am the natural choice
for Captain based on the team's good performance and general harmony
in
the later rounds at Turin 2006. Of course I also have the time
available. I'm soliciting opinions from the other players and will
make
a decision over the week-end, or sooner if Pascal makes up his mind.

The following is another posting for the Blog dealing with the new
rules implemented for the Dresden games::

June 19, 2008

The Chief Arbiter of the Dresden 2008 games is Ignatius Leong of
Singapore. He also serves as the General Secretary of the World Chess
Federation which is known by its French acronym of F.I.D.E. On June 3
Mr. Leong visited Dresden to assess the ongoing preparations. In his
opinion they were excellent. For the Arbiters, Dresden will test a
number of new rules. Some of these are actually old rules that are
being retested, for example a prohibition on offerring draws before
the
thirtieth move. This was tried in the 1960s before being abandoned as
unenforcable when top players like Bobby Fischer ignored it. However
in
those days the Medals were decided by total points scored by a team.
At
Dresden the new scoring system will be based on match points. Scoring
a
win and three draws in a particular encounter will produce the same
benefit as winning all four games. This can lead to very safe chess
where risk is avoided and a draw the natural outcome. The prohibition
on short agreed draws is an attempt to counter-balance the new
scoring
system. Another rule change which may prove controversial is that
players must be at the board to shake hands at the beginning of the
round. Normally in a tournament a player can arrive up to an hour
late
with no penalty except the loss of thinking time as the clock runs.
Some players like to come ten or fifteen minutes late in order to
insulate themselves from the general commotion and harriedness of
rushing with crowds. Canadian Grandmaster Alexandre Lesiege was one
who
liked to be in the shower when the round officially commenced. He
said
he felt more alert and clear-headed when he did arrive and he valued
that more than a few minutes on the clock. Lesiege played for us in
four Olympiads between 1992 and 2002, twice on board two behind Kevin
Spraggett and twice on top board, before retiring from tournament
competition. Aside from the shower, there are of course some players
who value a last trip to the smoking zone, and others who are held up
by circumstances beyond their control. A famous historical example of
that variation was Moscow 1994. The players all stayed in the mammoth
Hotel Cosmos on a traffic island in Prospect Mir. The Cosmos
elevators
stuck with such regularity that dozens of players were predictably
absent at the commencement of the round. It is highly unlikely anyone
could be forfeited under such circumstances.

A big change for Dresden is reducing the size of the event. The
traditional 14 rounds have been cut to 11 and National Teams have one
rather than two reserves. This was necessary as the Olympiads had
become overwhelmingly enormous events: just too popular. Chess, like
soccer, requires very little equipment and so is played all over the
World. Here comes everybody.

At Turin 2006 there were 146 countries represented. The number of
players was 873 even before Captains, Arbiters, journalists,
representatives to the F.I.D.E. congress, fans and friends were
hosted.
While Turin had the recently constructed Olympic Village for
accommodation, there are few cities in the World which can easily
handle such an influx of visitors. At Elista 1998 the Olympiad was
held in the Russian Republic of Kalmykia where F.I.D.E.President
Kirsan
Ilyumzhinov was also the national President of the country. As such
he
simply arranged the construction of a new suburban subdivision, Chess
City, where each team had its own house. The map was laid out like a
chess board and Canada House had a corner square, A-1, which looked
out
on a scenic lake. Few potential host countries have such fortuitous
possibilities.

The link will take you to a game between Alexandre Lesiege and
Bulgarian Grandmaster Veselin Topalov played on first board at the
34th
Olympiad, Istanbul 2000. By the new rules Topalov would not be
allowed
to offer the draw after his 26th move. Quite possibly the game would
result in a draw anyway, a computer thought so, but with the new rule
the spectators will get to see a few more moves and perhaps
understand
why.

http://www.chessgames.com/perl/chessgame?gid=1401693

--Lawrence Day